How to Stitch and Glue Boat Building-Glassing Butt Joints

foreign .com here in this video we are going to show you how we glass a butt joint for a stitch and glue boat we start out by test fitting and cleaning up the joint so as you can see in this case this one doesn't quite match up the pieces are backwards so we're going to flip that around and get them matched up if there's any shavings or any sawdust or any thing hanging on there we'll clean it up with the sanding block the nice thing about that I like about butt joints is they're pretty actually easy to line up in this case you just check the edges and the corners and make sure they're good to go I'll use two inch masking tape and I'll pull tight on that masking tape so it sucks the joint together I'll put a number of pieces Across The Joint at 90 degrees and that pulls that nice and tight and then I'll do one piece Across The Joint uh you know at the opposite 90 so it goes along the joint to cover that up and so that it doesn't get epoxy weak through to the other side and create a mess on your plywood so now that I have those 90 degree ones done and it's pulling that joint tight we're going to put one across there and press everything down nice and tight you do want to make sure you get it down nice and tight otherwise the epoxy will leak under there so now that I've done that one I'm going to flip that panel over and if you're real careful that panel will flip nicely you shouldn't have any problems if it's a big panel you might want to get somebody to help you yeah but it holds together pretty well we'll get that lined up we do have plastic on the floor in case there's some leakage or anything in this case we're doing it on a concrete floor so what we'll do later on is we'll wait those down to hold them in place if we're doing on a wood floor we could actually screw them in place or nail them in place and we'll do the other side panels this particular boat has a bottom and two side panels that need to be scarfed or join together uh in this once we have that done we're going to jump over and cut our fiberglass tape we'll cut that to length I usually cut it either right to the exact length or about a quarter inch under you want it to go all the way out to the edge even though once it's in the boat it really shouldn't matter because of the way the joints will be but before you get to the boat it'll help hold everything together better if it goes all the way to the edge so we're just measuring have already measured the boat and are now measuring the fiberglass tape pieces and cutting those out we're gonna put peel ply over the tape and the peel ply what that does is gives us a nicer finish and it Smooths down the edges so there's less sanding and fairing to do so I'm going to cut the peel ply pieces right now to go over that you want to cut those a little oversized and it really doesn't matter if they're a lot oversized that's great but I would probably go at least one inch on each side bigger uh and like I said you could really get a little bit bigger than that it won't hurt you too small it's not good too big is okay in this case once we have the peel ply uh all cut out we'll move over to our laminating station uh we typically will just cover one of our tables with some plastic and laminate on that we don't actually do the lamination on the part itself it's cleaner to do it off part and then put it on the part so we have a table here with some plastic on it uh we'll wet that tape out and I'll get some epoxy on there and spread it out and just kind of let nature take its course and soak in while it's soaking in I'll jump over to the boat and pre-wet the joint and make sure I have epoxy between the two edges of the plywood I have not really ran into any issues with starving but some people recommend pre-coating a couple of times or once before wedding out and letting that set up and then doing your wet out on the end grain where it could suck in more epoxy but I've not seen an issue but I'm just mentioning that in case you want to do it so I'm going to jump over here and saturate that joint and pre-wet the wood so I pick up the panel a little bit to open that joint out and then work the epoxy in with the brush in this case we're using four inch tape and I think I was using a two inch brush and so then I'll just brush down along each side of the joint with some epoxy to pre- pre-wet the wood before putting that saturated tape on there and I wish we could speed things up in real life like you can in video but here we go uh and high speed getting those all wet out and we've come back over the table and I'm gonna just work the excess epoxy off that tape while I was over doing the rest of it the tape went out nicely so just get the excess off of there and then go put it in place if you could use a bubble roller here to get out any bubbles but honestly the squeegee is going to work fine or you can use a brush to to work it uh normally I would not also work in sandals um but this was summertime on the weekend when I came in to do this and that's what I was wearing so but you want to keep the epoxy off your skin it's a potential health issue you can become sensitized to it and then allergic to it and one of the easiest things to get epoxy on is your feet and so again I generally wouldn't recommend wearing sandals so I've dropped that saturated cloth on there if it's a longer seam or something bigger you can also roll that tape up and then take it over and and roll it out in place if you're gonna do that though don't roll it up until you're ready to move it uh because if you roll a bunch of them up and you're off working on something for a bit they will get hot as they begin to cure and go off too fast so but if you leave it out flat you'll have more working time and then you know once you need to move it you can just roll it up and then unroll it in place so I'm placing the peel ply on with the peel ply you want to make sure it's saturated out all the way and this saturated past the edge of the the tape and that will give you the nice little transition from the edge of the tape to the wood once you've got the pill ply saturated all the way out the next thing to do is Place plastic over the joint and then again because we're on a concrete floor here what we're going to do is put weight on top of it to hold those joints flat if we were on a wood floor we could use nails or weight we could do the same thing we're doing or screws to to hold two edges so that they're flat so I'm just going to place some wood on there and then put some weight we tend to have a lot of buckets of resin so we're going to use that but you could use whatever you have for weight and even five gallon buckets of water in them or something once that has cured uh we'll just remove all the boards and if we're not gonna actually use it right away I'll leave the peel ply on until right before we stitch the boat together that just keeps that joint clean but I'm going to show you here we're going to pull that peel ply off and what we end up with is a nice transition at the edge everything's down nice and flat and ready to go in this case we're going to stitch this to the boat with just one side Bond it but if you got to move it around a lot or you're concerned about it you can flip it over pull the tape and do the same thing on the other side for this particular boat where these joints line up in the process and the fact that the outside gets completely glassed over we're only going to do one side and then when we stitch it together have the tape side the masking tape side facing to the outside as you can see even with that once only one side done the panel is pretty stiff goes together nicely and we've done a number of boats this way and it's not an issue so thank you for watching and have a great day [Music]

Channel: Fiberglass Supply

Views: 145,850

Keywords: Stitch and Glue, boat building, butt joint, joining plywood, scarfing, stitch and glue boat building, stitch and glue boat, wooden boat building, plywood boat building, boat building projects, how to stitch and glue, stitch and glue boat building techniques, stitch and glue boat building videos, stitch and glue seam, stitch and glue kayak, stitch and glue epoxy

Id: bxQA4v4_PqU

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022