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Cedar Strip Canoe Build...

April 17 Canoe Progress.

This is what we’ve been working towards! Tonight we glassed the outside of the hull.

And even more importantly, I remembered to bring a camera that works. Even better, a photographer! (My son injured his hand, so I nominated him as photographer for the evening, and he took a ton of creative shots.)




This greeted us when we arrived, a roll of fibreglass cloth draped over the canoe. It is just wide enough to hang about 2” past the gunnels at the widest point. We rolled it out, centred it, and smoothed it down. NO WRINKLES ALLOWED!


One little non-standard touch was this… My buddy cut a long oval piece which we slipped under the cloth at both ends. This gives us a double-thickness just under the bow and stern where you are likely to “ground” the canoe when you hit shore.


And we’re off with the first pouring of resin. We mixed it in small 3-4cup batches and poured it on and spread it with those spreaders. And yes, we ALL wore gloves (right after this photo), and old clothes, and had paper on the floor to catch the drips.


We had two people spreading and one pouring, most of the evening. At first we just spread it out and let it soak through. The resin is basically liquid glue, so we want it to soak through the cloth and into the wood. The fibreglass cloth provides the strength. Later we went over everything several times. It requires a light touch, as you want to spread it and get rid of any air bubbles, but you DON’T want to push so hard that the resin is UNDER the cloth, it needs to be in the cloth also.



The lower sections and the ends are trickier. We need to work quickly, with small amounts.


Doesn’t it make the cedar look gorgeous?


At the lower edges we had to work carefully to ensure it was full adhered and there was resin everywhere.


Here, most of the body is finished, just touching up and then working on the ends



A closeup of the bottom


...continued...
 
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April 17 Canoe Progress. (part 2)



The ends required some care.


We trimmed the ends so they were maybe 2” longer than the canoe, following the curve of the end, and then cut up the centre.


Then we poured epoxy on one side and worked it in…


… and folded over the cloth. Look close and you can see in the top section of the photo the cloth is embedded in epoxy, and the lower section still needs to be glued.


Close-up of the top section. Looks kind of gnarly at first, but give it time!!



Almost done:


Look closely, you can just see in the foreground the slight bump in the cloth from where we put that elongated oval piece under the cloth as extra reinforcement.


Here you can see how the sides are now complete all the way down to the gunnels.


Here’s a tip that my buddy picked up from a professional boat-building company. This is NOT in the Ted Moores book! It is tough to finish the ends. You risk pushing the resin away from the cloth. We wrap the ends in a strip of plastic wrap (the boat company used a different product, but essentially the same thing) and this helps get rid of the air bubbles while not pushing away the resin from the stem. It’s hard to explain, but it looks great. Once dry we just peel off the plastic.


And that is it for the night. This was a longer weekday evening — just over 2hrs in total. Next time we will be doing the second coat.
 
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The part I hate, along with the sanding afterward. Really looks nice and it will even look better with the second coat. Your team are really working good together. Can you imagine how stressful and difficult that would be doing it by ones self!
 
Thank you Art you have just covered the one aspect to this build that is a huge deterrent to tackling a project like this. What was the fumes like from the epoxy? I was expecting that you wear masks but looks like it was not an issue. I thought there was a catalyst type reaction in the mixing of the epoxy? Sorry for what might seem like stupid questions but i have never mixed anything like the west stuff myself to date.

I am interested in the plastic wrap part could you try explain a bit more of what happens there after you go back. Do you leave that wrap on while the whole thing dries. When you peel it away is it going to be totally smooth or will it have ridges from where the epoxy filled creases on the plastic needing to be sanded away? Very clever idea to put that extra oval piece in it adds to the looks too i think. Definitely a stitch in time kind of thing. So happy to see this whole project unfold like this. Are you keeping hours log from all labor that have been involved? YOu say 2 hour night but how many were there and what would you think this would have taken if diy on your own. Do you think ones missus and yourself could have tackled it in a day? From what i have gathered in my past reading this phase is one you have to go from start to finish in one sitting, would that be true from your experience now?
 
Rob Keeble said:
Thank you Art you have just covered the one aspect to this build that is a huge deterrent to tackling a project like this. What was the fumes like from the epoxy? I was expecting that you wear masks but looks like it was not an issue. I thought there was a catalyst type reaction in the mixing of the epoxy? Sorry for what might seem like stupid questions but i have never mixed anything like the west stuff myself to date.

I am interested in the plastic wrap part could you try explain a bit more of what happens there after you go back. Do you leave that wrap on while the whole thing dries. When you peel it away is it going to be totally smooth or will it have ridges from where the epoxy filled creases on the plastic needing to be sanded away? Very clever idea to put that extra oval piece in it adds to the looks too i think. Definitely a stitch in time kind of thing. So happy to see this whole project unfold like this. Are you keeping hours log from all labor that have been involved? YOu say 2 hour night but how many were there and what would you think this would have taken if diy on your own. Do you think ones missus and yourself could have tackled it in a day? From what i have gathered in my past reading this phase is one you have to go from start to finish in one sitting, would that be true from your experience now?
Click to expand...

Rob,

I'll do my best to answer...

- None of us found the fumes that bad. We opened the outside door about 2" for half the time, which let in some cold, but also some fresh air. I was actually expecting worse. It was quite mild.

The resin is mixed 2:1 with hardener -- and I did not do any of the mixing so I might be backwards on that, maybe it was 1:2. It is a chemical reaction. This stuff takes 8hrs to harden, according to my friend.
Note that you can pick up a small West epoxy kit at Lee Valley, for other uses. I have one at home.

We will peel of the wrap when we go back, and my recollection from my friend is that it will NOT all peel off, but that is no big deal. He really smoothed it down, so I would not expect much in the way of ridges.

We did this in 2hrs. I think you could do it in 2-3hrs with just two people if you stopped less, and knew a bit more. We're trying to keep this social as well, and there is a lot of explaining to amateurs. BUT BUT BUT, I would not presume to say whether or not you could do this with your missus or not. For instance, have you ever hung wallpaper together? :eek:

And Yes, this particular step is a start-to-finish-mandatory sort of thing. Ideally I would have gone back about 8hrs later (like maybe this morning) and put on the next coat, but we all have day jobs! :(

I am NOT keeping a log of hours. But you could go back and add it up pretty easily by counting all the days that I've written about. Most of the Wednesday evenings are in the 90 minute range, and the Saturdays are 2 or 2-1/2 hrs. Here, Rob, next door to you in Waterloo I came across a canoe company that also offers classes: http://www.handcraftedcanoes.com/Build_your_own_cedar_strip_canoe.html They claim that if you go to their class that you can build it start to finish in 8 days. DISCLAIMER: I've never been there or spoken to them. I suspect that a bunch of stuff (like cutting the strips and setting up the strongback+molds is already done for you which we had to do ourselves.
 
That's looking really good :thumb:. Almost to good to use :eek:

The fitting of the bottom looked slightly less terrifying than I was afraid it would be :D Maybe it was just you guys made it look easy from here.

Nice job on the glass work, my few attempts at that (mostly surfboard repair back when I had a surfboard..) weren't nearly as smooth.
 
great follow threw on this art,, and its looking good i can still remeber the fumes from making a boat years ago after you prodded my memory of my school days and fiberglass boats.
 
Apr 23 Evening Work…


So the ends of the canoe under the plastic wrap were not exactly smooth…


My task was therefore to do some light light light sanding. I was using 320 grit in my ROS and I was checking with my fingers every two seconds or so. The goal here is not to get perfectly smooth, but to take off the high points.


Meanwhile, the other guys broke out the scotchbrite pads and started working over the canoe.
Believe me, there were plenty of “Wax on, Wax off” jokes!


They also loosened the station moods a bit, and I missed this totally as I was working on the ends the whole time, so I’m not even sure what they did here. Oh yeah, as you can see we also trimmed off the excess fibreglass cloth which was extending below the gunnels.


Here was another big reveal as we lifted the canoe off of the form for the first time ever.
Houston, we have liftoff!


Here it is. The end molds are still in there. They’re mostly held by friction, but also maybe by a bit of glue squeeze-through.


A bit of carefully applied persuasion and the ends of the forms were also removed!


A look inside one of the ends.


Here is another look. I was trying to get a picture of how thin the sides are, but it is difficult to see in the image.
The whole thing was incredibly light at this point. We have several more pounds of fibreglass + resin to apply to it, as well as the seats, thwart, and gunnels.


The inside was pretty rough, as expected, but not bad. You can see a few dark brown horizontal stripes in the top third of this photo. That is places where the resin soaked right through a gap or crack to the inside, which is precisely what it is supposed to do, filling and bonding as it does.
 
Apr 23 Continued ….

Then it was time to pop it back onto the form loosely


And some more “wax on wax off” with the scotchbrite pads. We’re trying to take the gloss off the resin, before we apply the second coat.




We used a roller to wipe this on thin, and had the whole thing coated in about 15 minutes.


Last shot of the day. More sanding next time!
 
Thanks Art for all the pics. Are you guys going to be putting more glass on the bottom or only build the resin thickness?

@Darren its essentially a fibreglass canoe with wood decoration liner. :)

The lousy part is yet to come, sanding the inside before glassing. :(

Sent from my SGH-I337M using Tapatalk
 
Rob Keeble said:
Thanks Art for all the pics. Are you guys going to be putting more glass on the bottom or only build the resin thickness?
Click to expand...

Nope.

It gets one layer of glass on the outside, two coats of resin. (maybe some touchup extra...)
It then gets one layer of glass on the inside, and one coat of resin.

And Your comment to Darren is, I think, essentially correct.
My understanding is something like this: the wood provides shape and structure. The fibreglass provides the strength. The epoxy resin provides the glue and watertightness.
 
Apr 26

Springtime and people get busy… Only three of us were available today, but we still made some good progress.

These first few shots sort of belong with the last day of work. Here is what the canoe looked like after the second coat of epoxy dried. Gorgeous. Mostly



Overall view.


Oops. Yeah, a few runs here and there. I started to do some sanding. It all needs to be sanded smooth eventually.



But then my buddy showed up and had me stop. Yeah, it needs to happen, but there is a better use of our time. The epoxy will still harden more as it cures, and it is actually easier to sand when it is harder. So we turned our attention elsewhere, which is to the interior. We set things up to sand the inside. We also took down the station molds as we don’t need them anymore.


Time to pull out the 50 grit 6” ROS again and get busy. It’s a noisy, dusty, arm-wearying job (from the vibrations), but it needs to be done.


Meanwhile I worked on some scarf joints.

The gunnel (gunwale) is made up of two pieces, the part on the inside of the cedar canoe shell is the inwale, and the part on the outside of the cedar shell is the outwale. Unfortunately we did not have an easy source of 16ft (plus) boards, so we have to make do with 10ft ash. So we needed to make the boards longer.

Where is that board stretcher?

So, we set up the miter saw to take a 6-degree cut, and cut the ends of the pieces


And then I glued up the scarf joints. This project is full of firsts for me, first scarf joints I’ve ever done. And they will need to bend too, when they are fitted in place! We have seven-inch long joints, which is what the book recommends for a good strong joint. Hopefully it works!


Here I have the inwales glued and clamped in place


And then the two outwales. The strongback makes a nice long place for this clamping procedure. See the step stool in the foreground? I added that for climbing over the strongback — the pieces are so long that I can’t really get around them at the ends.


And a final look at the canoe. We probably aren’t half done the sanding, but that was all we got done today.
 
Thank you for the update pics Art.

Hearing of wood you using for gunwhales etc do you think Ash is a good choice here. I know its pleanty strong but for an edge thats going to be handled frequently i was thinking it could cause splinters no?
It will be a nice contrast but i was thinking would malple not be a better choice of wood for this part of the canoe? I realize you guys had to go with what was available affordable etc but thinking of the ideal?

Sent from my SGH-I337M using Tapatalk
 
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