I had previously joined over 30 fibreglass touring kayaks about 14 ft long with no problems, so was not concerned about joining my Night Heron.
However, I had not counted on the fact that the best solutiion I could find for a small difference in the the width of the hull and deck involved spreaders inside the kayak.
In spite of keeping the deck and hull on the forms as much as possible, after glassing the outside, the hull was slightly narrower at the sheer and the deck was slightly wider.
Temporary external forms pulled the deck in and spreader sticks with a rib added in the middle at 90 degrees to stop the stick slipping onto the join gave a very good match.
Pushing a roll of wet joining tape became very difficult when I had to dodge sticks inside the kayak.
My solution was to tape a bent piece of wire to the end of my long stick so that the wire formed an axle inside the roll of tape. As soon as I fitted a small piece of plastic tube as a bearing on the axle, the system was much easier to control that just pushing with a stick.
Without the plastic sleeve, the roll just tightened up on the wire axle and refused to move.
The level of difficulty involved in extracting the wire axle depended on whether the curve at the end of the kayak prevented me unrolling the tape to the very end.
I have a couple of tiny pieces of plastic tube trapped somewhere in the end pour as I didn't think it was worth the effort to try to retrieve them or ensure that they stayed on the axle. A small price to pay for a much easier way of unrolling the tape while trying to dodge spreader sticks
Allan Newhouse