Removing the Wires

At last the hull will now hold its self together and I can take all of the wire stiches out. They have been a necessary evil to get the boat to this point but I will be happy to see them go. I lost count of the number of little cuts and scratches I picked up from all of the wires.

Just some of the 300 stiches that i remover from the
Sasafrass 16 hull

Using some wire cutters I sniped the wire on the outside in both placers just where it came up through the hull then I would crawl under the hull and pull it out. I would cut about 10 at a time  before getting under the boat. Most of them came out easily but about 10 of them gave me trouble. The ones at the bow and stern where the wire was hard to fee in were hard to get out. Also the stiches holding the bulk heads in place proved to be very difficult. I think this was because of the number of turns and the amount of friction on the wire. Placing a soldering iron on the end of the wire for about 1 minute to heat it up helped to get some of the difficult stiches out but some of them were so stubborn that they will be staying in there for the life of the boat.