Photos from Jan 18 (First day of the group build)
Team one was working on the stems.
Here is one of the canoe stem forms. The inner and outer stem pieces are being glued (laminated) into shape around the form with lots of clamps. The inner stem is pine, the outer is cherry. There are three (or four?) pieces in each. We glue them both at the same time. There is packing tape between the inner and outer stems, so we don’t inadvertently glue them together.
Team two was working on the strongback. Yours truly was in charge of that team. Here we are already done the build. (Sorry, no progress shots.) This is a pretty elegant design from the “Canoecraft” book. This is built from two sheets of plywood, to make a 16 foot long strongback. Two pieces are ripped at 12” to make the top. Five pieces are ripped at 8” to provide the sides. (There are four outer sides, and one piece is ripped in half and used to build the bridge section to connect the two 8ft sections together. This is made clear in the book.) Then a bunch more are ripped into (roughly) 8x8 pieces to make the inner ribs — the whole strongback is like a torsion box, though without a bottom. And the remaining scrap is enough to provide pieces to build the legs.
Team three was stuck outside as that was the only way they’d have enough room to rip the 18ft cedar boards into strips.
It was a pretty mediocre portable table saw, so they had to work hard to make sure that they were getting nice consistent thin strips out of the procedure.
Here I am as we are starting to fasten the forms onto the strongback. There is a form piece set every 12” down the length of the strongback. You start in the middle with form #0 and work out from there. This is a symmetric design, so after #0, all the other forms come in identical pairs. So it would look like 6-5-4-3-2-1-0-1-2-3-4-5-6 from one end to the other.
An overview of the shop from one corner. We have the 3,2,1,0 forms in place and are working on the #4 forms in this photo.
And a photo from the opposite corner. We’re now setting the pair of #5 forms onto the strongback. On the right-hand bench you can see one set of stems clamped and drying.
That was pretty much it for day one. We could not add any more forms onto the strongback as the ends were being used to form the stems.