. I sanded and glassed the glassed the hull before flipping the boat over and building the deck. I do this because Nick recommends it both of his books, and found it works well for me.

???
In my copy of Nick's "The Strip Built kayak" he describes doing all the stripping before any glassing.

I followed Nick's instructions for my first build and haven't varied that part of the process for the ten strippers I have built since then.

I don't do any sanding on the hull until the deck is also stripped. My theory is that there is no point creating a smooth surface that might be marked during the stripping of the deck. However, I have never seen any signs of the hull being marked.

That sequence minimizes the time between glassing outside and inside.

On my current build, I have seen the worst case of distortion caused by humidity changes that I have ever seen. After glassing the outside, when I removed the hull from the forms to clean up the inside, the maximum beam, which was supposed to be 500mm, grew to 600mm the next morning and shrank to 350mm that afternoon. I made sure I glassed the inside in the middle of the day when the dimension had returned to 500mm.

That is by far the worst distortion I have ever seen and may have been so extreme because of a heavy fog in the morning and a warm, dry day. Working outside under the shelter of my back deck possibly doesn't help. I believe that the main reason for the extreme distortion is that he hull is so thin. It is a racing kayak, so the strips are 3.5mm thick.

Distortion is normally not that extreme, but can be enough to cause issues if you aren't careful.

I wonder whether the idea of glassing the hull before stripping the deck is more suited ot an external strongback build than an internal.