In the last 10 days I went from a pile of wood to something that actually looks like a boat.  After getting the panels all lofted, cut out and marked up I began putting it all together.    I first wired in the two side panels in an afternoon, spent the next day cutting and preparing the bow and transom panels and then an afternoon wiring those in.   I then spent an afternoon getting in more bolts and wires to just make sure it was coming together well and another afternoon ripping my mahogany into strips for the rails.   By the time this was all done I had what looked like a hull.

The next step was to square everything up and get all the bolts and wires tightened.  Along with that I wanted to start pre-bending the rail material since that was not going to be an easy task and would take some time.   I tied down the corners of the boat, made sure the cross angles were close enough then had to pull in the port side a bit with a tension string to get the bottom flat.   I also built a simple jig to hold the rails, spread them and weight them to get the bends going in all the right directions.  Within a day the weights had pushed the center of the rails to the floor.

Yesterday I finally had a stretch of decent weather to start gluing the boat.  The first step in this process is what the builder calls jump-stitching which is using a caulk based Gel-Magic epoxy to lay in 4-10″ stitches of glue along the seams.  First I had to wet the edges with epoxy  then lay in the stitches.  This will now sit for about a week to cure all the way then I can remove the bolts and wires and hope the boat holds together.   I’ll try and spread the rails out from 1 to 2′ during this time too so that they have most of the bend they will need when they get put on after I get the inner seams all finished with filets and fiberglass tape and epoxy.