: I built the hull of my Mill Creek out of 1/4 inch luan. It worked fine. I
: just kept an eye out for the voids. I'm pretty sure the hull panels of the
: Cape Charles require a little more twist to be stitched together, but I
: think it will work fine for you too.

: I tried to use the 1/4 inch luan for the deck of the Mill Creek, but it
: couldn't make the radius of the curve. It started cracking loudly before I
: came even close to attaching it to the sheer clamps. I had to go out and
: buy the good stuff for the deck.

I think I read someplace in the distant past that interior plywoods were made with exterior glues. To check this out, two weeks ago I submerged 1/4" luan underwater. I check it out this morning and the luan had waterloged and sunk to the bottom of the container but the layers are still glued together and show no signs of seperating. So you might presoak you deck panels and then bend them into place without cracking.

The other thing I soaked under water for two weeks is blue building foam. I had always though of using it in the bow and stern for floation, but the consensus seem to be that it would water log. This doesn't seem to be true in my experiment. I weighed the soak foam this morning on gram scales along with an identical non soaked foam piece and they both weighed the same. So in my next boat I am going to use it as floatation.

John