Today I spent a fair amount of time tightening up all the stitches to bring the panels together, then gluing the panels together at the seams. Definitely allow about a whole day for this 'simple' step. You can always run into difficulties that take longer to resolve than expected. In my case, the bottom of the boat was not quite lined up with the panels at the garboard. I spent a fair amount of time banging the bottom up and down and managed to fully pop out the bottom at the bow. Quite the pain to put it back in.
One trick I've figured out is to first tighten the stitches quite well, then tap the panels into alignment. The pressure of the boards against each other will allow small adjustments to be made easily. Also, one way of knowing that you've tightened the stitches enough is to press down with your hand on the bottom/panel. If they move with respect to each other you can tighten the stitches a bit more.
The manual says you should have epoxy thin enough to load into a syringe but I found that it's not quite accurate. The first batch of epoxy was so thick that it wouldn't flow properly in the seams (and was a pain to clean up later) however it worked quite well in the syringe. Just aim for the 'traditional' mustard consistency and it should work fairly well. I guess I stitched everything right since I didn't see any runs inside the boat (i.e., the glue found no gaps to run through).
Here's the view from underneath.
Cleanup was an absolute bear. I came back about 1 - 2 hours after gluing the panels and the epoxy had solidified enough to make it hard to simply wipe off with denatured alcohol. A putty knife actually worked much better - I used it to scrape off the solidified epoxy, then went back with the rag to clean up whatever was left behind.
Here's the final glue job at the bow. Looks pretty good. Hopefully it will all hold together once I pop the stitches in a couple of days.
The last chore for the day was to glue together the various long pieces of wood from the kit - rub rails, mast, and boom. I read somewhere that I might want to paint the scarfs with unthickened epoxy so I did that first. The rest went quite well as I'm already quite handy with the silica-thickened glue. Hopefully the glue will hold - I'll find out fairly soon once I attach the rub rails to the boat. I also read some horror stories about the mast breaking under moderate wind conditions - I hope my glue job will hold.
Next I'll take a break for a day or so, then go back to finish gluing the seams and hopefully get started on the rudder.
Time: 2.5 hours - tightening the stitches, 1.5 hours gluing, 1.5 hours cleaning, 1 hour gluing the mast, boom, and the rub rails.
Total: 38.5 hours
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