JEM Watercraft

Once you get the frames in and snug up each of the stitches, it will form better. You'll notice that if you let the hull sit overnight, the wood yields to the pressure and fits into place better.

G'day Tor.
Funny......I picked up a roll of wire on the weekend to use in the Laker build.
Your comment about sore fingers confirms what I suspected might be the case..... but I figure the smaller stitch holes would be worth the suffering
As for the alignment of the panels, I had a similar situation with the CF build. Going back and re-stitching a little looser until all the stitches were in place.....then tweaking them a little tighter made all the difference.

Thats the beauty of the copper wire , easier to bend.

Chuck.

Oldsparkey wrote:Thats the beauty of the copper wire , easier to bend.

Chuck.

Us youngsters don't have a retirement fund, yet, that we can dip into to afford copper wire. That's why I use zip ties. Young and broke.

Crkldtr,
Piper put this link http://www.sciplus.com/index.cfm in Favorite Links on the SP Forum. Somewhere in there was spools of copper armature wire. If I remember correctly a 200 ft. spool of 20ga. wire was right at $4.00 a spool. That site has a lot of unusal stuff in it. They even have cell phone vibrator motors in there. Whatcha gonna do with one of those anyway?
Bob

jem wrote:You'll notice that if you let the hull sit overnight, the wood yields to the pressure and fits into place better.

He's bloody good you know.

That's exactly what I found, I left the panels overnight (ran out of time to finish the frames) and the frames went in beautifully. Some of the gaps have closed up but others could be a bit of a concern (I'm being far more fussy with this build).

So if I need to sand between the panels what do I stick my sandpaper to, the good lady wife won't let me steal her emery boards .

Tor
PS bit count is at 3

Well I had a large weekend.

I got on with a few jobs this weekend

I do like this shape



Now I have a little tip which made life a hell of a lot easier on my poor white collar fingers also a bit safer if you have 3 and a half foot helper in the shop.

Insert stitch from the out side



3 half twists on the inside



pinch



to look like this



find a convenient slotted piece of dowel



twist



look at that beautiful stitch and safe on the outside



Once the stitch is beautifully formed the dowel just lets it turn if you need it tighter you just tweak it with the pliers.

'tis looking beautiful (OK I've overused that word but...)

Tor

oh yeah before I forget like every one else's ply the pointy ends were a little tricky.

I'd tweak one panel and another would pop out so rather than rig up a fancy jig I figured I'd glue up one panel while it's in line and then go back to the panel that's not in in line and fix it up.

This is out of line it is



Just waiting for the glue to dry. Yes I learned to do the nice stitching later...

Tor

That's brilliant mate - my main gripe with wire ties is the number of puncture wounds in my hands from the sharp ends of the damn things . Haven't thought the whole process through yet but I guess that once the panels are tacked the stitches are removed so you never have to work around them on the sharp side. Looks like the "Tor stitch" is going to put wire back on my list of building materials .

Thanks for sharing and by the way the lines on that thing do look right don't they?

Nice work! She's taking a real nice shape.