Tacking the Seams

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The next step was to tack the seams together with epoxy putty, a mix of epoxy and wood flour. Since the closures of the tie wraps that were holding everything together were on the outside it seamed simplest to tape the seams on the inside and apply the putty from the outside. I started out using duct tape as recommended in various circles, but it was pretty gooey hard-to-use stuff, so I quickly switched to masking tape. As will be seen below, I had reason to be glad I did.

Taping the Inside Seams

So I applied a 2-3" long tack of epoxy putty every couple of feet along the the seams, closer together at the bow and stern where stresses were higher. I put the mixed putty in a plastic bag and cut a corner off it, using like a pastry bag to apply the putty. I had acquired and used some fast set harder in the light of my experience withe the long curing times joining the panels together. Towards the end of putting in the welds, the epoxy putty got almost too hot to hold from the chemical reaction of it setting. This problem bit me the next day putting in the fillets on the inside of the seams.

Tack Welds

The Front Tacked

It doesn't look too pretty at this point, but it's work in progress. With fingers crossed, I started cutting the tie wraps...the welds held. I pulled all the chunks of plywood inserted as spacers in the seams. All went well with ~1/4" of daylight through all the seams until I got to the stern. There I ended up with a wood-to-wood hard point contact at each corner of the stern,

Stern Hard Point

There was still some flex in the wood, so the fix was to push in a temporary spacer and put some putty in the space when I did the inside fillets

Hard Point Fix

The Duck "Quack Quack" Tape Issue

I taped the outside of the boat...

Outside Taped

and turned is over and stripped out the inside tape. Everywhere I had used masking tape, the weld surface was nice and clean with no residue. Everywhere I used the duct tape, the tape adhesive and fibers were embedded in the putty in a sticky mess.

Duct Tape Residue

It took a coup of hours of scraping to get it cleaned up to my satisfaction. The putty itself was well set and OK once I got the stuff off it. Duct tape is banned from this project from now on.

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