The stitches in “Stitch and Glue” construction

AVS Hull is primarily for designing “stitch and glue” plywood boats. In this post, I’ll show you where the stitches come from.

Here’s a picture of the first stitches I made in Anna’s Boat. The stitches are made by small pieces of copper wire twisted together (this is the bow of the top panel on the hull, but more on that in a future post). These stitches are intentionally loose to allow the bow to open up when I place the panels on the frame.

But where to get the little copper wires? I used a short piece (about 3 feet) of AVG 6 stranded wire (it was a left-over piece from when I installed my hot tub). I stripped the insulation off (harder than I anticipated), then split the wire into groups of 2-5 strands. The smaller groupings made it easier to do the next step.

I wrapped each bundle of wires around a scrap of wood and then cut the wires leaving pieces equal to one wrap of wire. The result was pieces about 4 inches long.

After doing all the bundles, I had a couple of hundred pieces ready to stitch my hull together. Three feet of wire yields 10-11 stitches per length, and there were 19 strands in the original wire.