I scarfed together the hull panels for my Cormorant 16 on Saturday, but I just noticed last night that I misaligned them. Drat!

I'm putting a strip deck on a s&g hull, and I only had one sheet of 4mm plywood on hand. Rather than cutting out full rectangles of plywood and scarfing them, then cutting out hull panels, I optimized in a way similar to what I did with my Chesapeake 2 years ago.

This time, I noticed that the bottom stern panels are 7/8" narrower than the bottom bow panels, so I cut the wood accordingly. Instead of aligning them with a 7/8" jog along the keel, where it would be cut away, I left the jog at the sheer, so it would make a really funny hull shape, to say the least!!!

It's all good--everyone makes mistakes (but some of us should know better!)

I plan to use a hot iron to loosen the epoxy, sand everything smooth again, and reglue the scarfs. Epoxy is wonderful for our purposes, but it has this little habit of letting go under high temperatures. None of us plan to ever paddle in 200*F+ temperatures, so it's not a boatbuilding problem. In other fields, this is a serious problem, but we can simply exploit it with boats. Just keep steady heat on the epoxy (make sure it's not so hot it scorches the wood) and it will slowly gel, and can be pulled apart.

If that doesn't work, I'll just run a jigsaw right up next to the scarf and do a "Pygmy-style" butt-joint.

Hopefully someone can learn from my mistake!!

Happy building and a Merry Christmas to all,

Shawn