Wiring and epoxying the deck

My next step was to lay the deck panels on the hull and wire the bow center pieces then add, drill holes on the shear deck panel opposing the already drilled holes on the center panel and wire them. Then I add the back center panels, drill and wire.

The deck recess plate (below) was a little tricky to get into place correctly, but with a little fiddling it seemed to fit pretty well. Unfortunately the smaller end of the half moon piece (near the shear) broke off. I ended up wiring it in and just putting a lot of epoxy in it and I think it will be fine. There was also a little gap in a similar place on the other side. I put plastic on the inside of it and filled the little gap with epoxy, the plastic made sure that all the epoxy didn't just run through.

It looks like a kayak!

After making sure it was aligned evenly I put two wires on each side near the center butt seam through the hull and deck to hold it in place. Then used a bunch of strips of strapping tape to hold the deck all around. I put some plastic at the bow and the stern in between the deck and the hull (to prevent sticking the two together).


Then I used the syringe and just like on the hull put a bead of epoxy in each seam, waited about 45 minutes then put another bead of epoxy this time thickened with wood flour wherever it was needed.

Then I had to work a bunch over the weekend and didn't have time till much later to get the wires out. When I tried to get the deck off the hull it wouldn't come off. Shit. The epoxy had run down the inside from some small gaps in the seams and stuck the deck to the hull. Luckily I just pulled up hard and it popped off with only a little loss of wood on the edge of the panels (and it was only in a few places). The epoxy wasn't still "green" and so I thought it would be a lot harder to get the wires out...and it was until I used the tip of a heated up glue gun to heat up the metal and melt the epoxy around the wire. Then they came out quite easily.

I don't have any pictures of it but after I got the wires out I used a combination of the glue gun (which does a really good job of breaking down big drips of epoxy quickly), the cabinet scraper and the file/rasp to get all of the excess epoxy that dripped through to the underside of the deck. Then I put it back on the hull and added another round of wood flour-thickened epoxy to any seam that needed it.