Received the kit from CLC. It was shipped via FedEx as a 1200 lb pallet and several assorted extras. One of the photos shows the build space, which includes two 8-foot sawhorse tables and occupies about 1/2 of a suburban 3-car garage.

I pulled apart the pallet. The major components are all cut from about 9 full-sized sheets of Okoume marine plywood of various thicknesses. The parts have retaining tabs to hold them in the plywood. Once everything is freed from the sheets, there are some usable bits left behind. I have cut the biggest bits out of this waste and saved them. Then I organized all the parts and laid them out in some kind of order for assembly

Any stitch-and-glue boat beyond 8' long requires two or more carefully shaped plywood pieces to be glued together to form one long strake. Pygmy used to use just flat butt joints. CLC uses puzzle joints, which facilitate aligning the planks lengthwise and holding them in place while the epoxy cures. Careful attention must be paid to leveling the joint so there is no vertical misalignment. Here is the number one plank being joined.

There are 7 frames in the boat. All the frames have cleats glued to them to support the decks. The main deck is cambered athwartship, so the cleats have to be bent or shaped in some way to support the cambered deck. I did this by attaching small blocks to the frames and using those to bend the cleats into shape with C-clamps. I considered gluing the cleats onto the frames without bending them, but there was enough camber that I would have planed away more than half of the cleats at their ends. Some of the cleats had to be installed in places my clamps would not reach so I just screwed them into place temporarily.

Here I have begun to attach the first panels to the keel panel with copper wires. The whole assembly is wobbly and fragile at this point. Getting it into some semblance of its final shape is what is important here. Final alignment is done later. This step is very tricky if you are working alone, as I was. Clamps, tape, bungee cords, and ratchet straps were all used to get things in place for stiching.

Once the first plank is in place and fairly solid, the rest of the planks can be wired on pretty fast. The whole thing starts to look like a boat. It gives you hope that you will get through this build quickly. This is deluded thinking. It's exciting to see, but it is just a tiny part of the work to come. Here you can see some of the details of wiring planks on. In this design, there are 4 hull panels in addition to the keel plate.

It's traditional among boat builders to celebrate attaching the final plank by sharing a whiskey. In traditional boatbuilding, fastening the final plank to the hull is a little more significant than it is in stitch-and-glue projects. Here, the hull has its shape, but there is a huge amount of work to go on the hull before one really deserves a whiskey. Nevertheless, it's exciting to see the hull take shape, and that should be celebrated.

Bow and stern breasthooks are smallish triangular pieces of wood that reinforce the ends of the boat and provide a surface to support the deck in both areas. The CNC machine that CLC uses to cut its pieces only cuts normal to the surface of the work, so these pieces must be shaped to fit. It's a bit tedious to do this shaping with a lot of plane and rasp work with many dry fittings. The breast hooks are in a place where it is awkward to clamp them so they are screwed in temporarily while the glue cures.