: Hi Folks.

: I've recently discovered that my hull is too wide (or, my deck too narrow).

Hi Rick,

A 1/4" gap is nothing. My deck was about 6" narrower. It curled up so bad that when I tried to expand it to fit my hull it cracked in several places and buckled. And this is with one layer of 6 oz glass on it. I had a lot of 1/8 " strips in my deck design and I think this is what caused my problem. This lead to a lot of work trying to stablize the deck buckles and cracks and hold the deck together while I made the next attempt to fasten the deck and hall together. I had three layers of 6 oz glass under the deck before fastening the hall and deck together. After I had them fastened together then I had to sand the deck buckles out and also sand the the hall/deck joint smooth before tape glassing them. I spread the deck with 1/4x3/4 inch strips for spreaders that were longer then the width they were to spread and they were under great pressure and bent like a bow and arrow. The ends of the spreaders were arched and half of the 3/4 inch strip was up in the deck and the hall easily slipped on then to match the deck. I then used 4 cam-straps and ratch them together. The boat ended up looking great and you can't tell there was such a bad problem. So you have nothing to worry about. Anything can be fixed.

John