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Bill started the topic Alternate floor-tube-seam joining method on V2 kits in the forum DIY Packrafts 4 years, 2 months ago
If anybody is building an older V2 kit, I have a small tweak to the construction that you might try. This is particularly useful if you are building the V2 in the style of the newer kits. I came upon the idea because I built a Skeena (a 4th generation design) and soon after a friend gave me an old V2 kit that he never built.
The V2 has a single-sided floor (TPU facing in), which requires that the seam sealing strip is folded back upon itself at the outside floor-tube junction. This makes a small pocket, which needs to be filled with glue and seemed like a bit of a weak point where the overlap of my fabrics was pretty small. Due to inaccurate construction on my part at the bow, the tube 1R and 1L fabric was gapped such that the seam strip would barely cover, so I needed a better solution. What I came up with was using a small piece of two-side-coated (new floor) fabric to make a trapezoidal patch that fit between the floor and tubes and ran about 10cm up the tube-tube seam from the floor edge. This patch was sealed between the floor and the adjoining tube pieces and then the tube fabric was sealed (from the inside of the tube) to the inside of this two-side-coated fabric, being careful to not overheat it and melt the outside TPU. I then ran the seam strip over the top of the outside of the small patch and down to end right at the floor. The photo shows what this looks like. Although I didn’t do this at every seam strip to floor junction, it could be done that way, eliminating all the “pockets” that are present in the folded-back design. I felt like it was strong and it didn’t leak air.
Great idea! The pic really helps to envision it.