Instant boat!
The canoes have gone 3D. A major innovation in some recent Mik Storer designs (Quick Canoe and Oz Racer) is that the boats are first assembled with duct tape, then glued together with epoxy fillets before the tape is removed. As you might imagine, this is a very fast method of construction. The “instant boat” approach greatly reduces the time to assemble a hull, when compared to methods such as chine logs that rely more heavily on carpentry skills.
Sides
First step is to join the side panels at stem and stern.
Spreaders
Then spreaders are cut from scrap lumber to lengths specified in the plans. With the spreaders screwed in place, the basic boat shape is evident.
Bottom
Next, the sides are (carefully!) flipped upside down, and the bottom is taped down starting in the middle. Securing all the edges together flexes the plywood sheets, which helps provide some decent stiffness to the hull structure, though you still need to handle it carefully. We found that there was a fair bit of wood dust (generated while cutting the panels) clinging to the plywood. This caused the tape to not hold as strongly as I’d have liked. We had a near-disastrous failure of the tape at one end of one boat after the fillets were applied. I was lucky to discover it before the epoxy set, which allowed me to do an emergency repair.
Complete!
Finally, the boat is flipped back over in preparation to fillet the interior joints.
