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Cedar Strip Canoe Build...

Enjoying all your hard work. This is the way to build a canoe, just sit and watch. Actually it makes me want to get the plans down that I have had sitting on the shelf for the past 10 years.
 
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Good point Vaughn. Never thought of that. Reckon its also been a good axe handle so my concerns are for naught. Thinking of the rough stuff i got that bit me. :)


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May 07 - Evening Progress

Mostly sanding…

Here is the canoe as of the start of the evening. Most of one inside side has been rough-sanded.
(Remember, I was away last Wednesday and that happened at that time.)


Here you can see the rougher wood in tight near the bow/stern. We can’t get that close with the sander. So we’ll have to hand scrape + sand that tight spot.


I took a turn on the 40-grit sander. Powerful, but vibrates a lot and is hard on my hands. (I admit, I’m an office worker by day!)


40 grit is VERY rough, so the main thing to keep in mind is always keep the sander in motion. I worked about 15 minutes before my buddy showed up and took over.



My buddy took the canoe outside and worked on getting all the inside sanding done.


One of the nice things about being outside is the fresh air and space makes the dust much less an issue. It also is more public, so folks who are at church for other activities will stop by and chat, which is nice.


CONTINUED…
 
May 07 CONTINUED…


Meanwhile, my sons and I worked on re-doing the gunnels. Full disclosure time… I had been alone the night that I first glued up the scarf joints on the gunnels. I had misunderstood my friends instructions and used regular glue instead of epoxy. We decided that we should not take a chance, so I cut the joints open and redid them, using epoxy (fully waterproof!) this time.


Fortunately, we still had the plywood jig that we used for making the 6-degree scarf cuts.


Cutting a scarf joint in the end of one of the gunnel pieces. We need to hold the piece firmly, as it wants to pull into the blade.


Now, clamped and glued the right way!
One extra bonus was that I got to re-orient the cuts. Now that I had done it once and understood the mechanics of it, I was careful to layout all the scarf joints so that the LONG part of the joint faced the sides rather than the top. In that way there is only a short line on the top of the gunnel to show where the joint is, and the long long is on the sides more out of view.


It really is awkward clamping these long floppy boards!


Just about done for the night, note the pole of sawdust!


Oops. After we put the canoe up on the rack for the night I happened to look up inside it and saw this. Yup, that is light shining through. Those are very bright lights and they’re very close to the canoe hull (maybe 2ft above them), so it’s not like this is a hole, but the cedar is getting a bit thin in those 3 spots. We’ll be careful with more sanding, and the inner layer of fibreglass will take care of it!


Next time we will be finish-sanding the interior with 100 grit, and then after that (I think) it’s on to glassing the inside.

thanks for reading.
 
Art Mulder said:
...Next time we will be finish-sanding the interior with 100 grit, and then after that (I think) it’s on to glassing the inside.

thanks for reading.
Click to expand...

Why not leave it at the 40 grit to allow the epoxy to have more 'tooth' to adhere to? I'd think that would make for an even better bond.
 
Jim DeLaney said:
Why not leave it at the 40 grit to allow the epoxy to have more 'tooth' to adhere to? I'd think that would make for an even better bond.
Click to expand...

honestly, I have no idea... I'll try to remember to ask my buddy. It's the inside, so we don't care about smoothness for the water, and we like the grippiness... Hmmm.
 
May 14

Nothing but sanding tonight…
We went over the inside, sanding it to 120grit.

We forgot to bring scrapers, so that is the last bit that we need to do next week before glassing the inside.

……….

My son was having fun with the camera… Here is a closeup of the top of one of the stems. We’ll have to clean this up when we install the inwales and outwales and deck.
On the inside of the boat you can see the cedar strips. Next standing tall is the pale pine of the inner stem. On the front is the rounded cherry outer stem. And wrapped around all of it is the fibreglass cloth and resin.



The weather was dry after a day with scattered rain, so we took the canoe outside in it’s cradles




So it was all about Sanding today


And Sanding…


Did I mention the sanding? Three of us were going at it most of the time.


Every now and then I would pause to vacuum out the dust. This gives us a better view, and also speeds the sanding since the grit gets in the way and inhibits progress.


May 14 Continued…
 
May 14 Continued…

Later on, we flipped it and my buddy got to work on the outside. You may recall that we had left this a few weeks back with some drips here and there. Now that the outside was well hardened, it was a quick process to sand those down.




Lots of this stuff…




Closeup on one of the ends. Right in the middle is one of the spots where we plugged a screw hole.


And at the end we cleaned off the dust…


And tucked it away until next week.


We will NOT be working on it this weekend due to various busyness and the fact that it is a holiday weekend. NEXT Wednesday we will be glassing the inside.
 
Jim DeLaney said:
Why not leave it at the 40 grit to allow the epoxy to have more 'tooth' to adhere to? I'd think that would make for an even better bond.
Click to expand...
Hey again, Jim! I remembered to discuss this with my buddy last night.

The only reason for taking this to 100/120 grit is for personal aesthetics. You do need the surface to be "Smooth-ish" as you need the fibreglass cloth to be flat on the wood so it adheres well. So we can't just leave it rough with ridges, for instance.

...art
 
May 21 Canoe Build.

HUGE picture dump this time… Tonight we glassed the inside of the canoe.

First, just for fun, here’s my buddies day job…


First we had to clean up the insides of the ends. Used a paint scraper here, to get any glue drips out of there and try and smooth things.


Lots and lots of scraping…


Made lots of these…


My son had fun with the camera…


Everything had to be vacuumed out


I also brought this compact sander that we could squeeze in there also.


That was about it for sanding. We flipped the canoe over and banged out the dust, and then turned it back over and draped over the fibreglass cloth.

Unfortunately, that was when my camera decided to go nuts. Hopefully this is just a setting screw up that I can fix, but it might be a fried image sensor. I did my best to post process some of the photos to make them viewable. Fortunately my buddy has a pretty new smart phone so most of the rest of the photos are from his phone.



Fitting the cloth in as best we can. In the middle it is fairly easy to smooth it flat. At the ends, we didn’t even try.


Next it was time to pour in the resin, and we got busy with the spreaders. We are not pushing hard, we are just spreading it out. We want it to soak through the cloth and into the cedar.


CONTINUED…
 
CONTINUED…

Once we had most of the center saturated we start pulling the resin up the sides. The goal is to wet the cloth and have it stick to the sides.


It was a long process, requiring patience and a light touch. All told it was probably two hours for four of us to do this.


(another bad photo, last one) Lots of fiddling and spreading as we get close to the ends. We have to be careful to NOT pull on the cloth, or it might lift out of the resin. We need the cloth to be fully embedded in the resin and bonded to the cedar.


As we worked along, my son cut off the excess fiberglass, cutting it back first to about 1” from the sides, and later coming back and cutting it back to 1/2”. If we left it long, the weight of the cloth would pull the inside cloth out of position.

In the background of this shot you can see us trying to work into the end.


Close-up shot inside one of the ends.
It's tricky to fit the cloth in the end. Here it needs to fit over the stem, which stick inside the canoe at the end. We nicked the cloth here with the knife to open up a half-inch gap so it would lay down in front of the stem.


Here, my son and I are cutting away the excess cloth and doing our best to fit it into the stem. (This was the second end, my buddy did the other end, which I watched, and then I felt a bit ready to tackle this one.) The goal is to have the cloth meet right at the stem, all nice and neat.

(hah!)


The reality is things just get kind of ugly inside the stems. We used a sacrificial paint brush to get in there and spread resin around and make sure all the wood and cloth is saturated.


Going over the canoe after the resin has been soaking for a while. This cleans up any drips and any "fuzz" that has come up off the cloth.


Almost done for the night:


Near the end we were blotting out resin -- it gradually works through the weave and drips down inside the ends and pools right there below the stem.


And that is it for the night.

Next week we hope to start work on fitting the gunnels. (inwales and outwales).
 
Oh man i am just drooling all over my keyboard following this thread. Art this thread is going to be one of the most valuable resources for anyone wanting to do this. I am of the opinion we should turn this into a sticky or how to and put it in the Tutorial section. I think you have done a better job than the book itself by having so many pics providing such good detail in color. It would make an awesome video to compile the pics into a video photo essay. But not a timelapse rather just a plod along how to instructional. Thanks a ton for taking the time to do this.
 
May 28

My buddy — you know, the guy who actually knows what he is doing — couldn’t make it last night. So it was just me and my two sons, and one other guy who popped by for a while.

So there was not a huge amount of progress, but still made some steps forward.

We’re now at the trimming out stage. So I read the Ted Moores book section about fitting the inwales and worked on getting one fitted.

First, I took a few posed shots, just to show how far we were. Here it is inside just after we arrived.


Then we trimmed off all the extra fibreglass and moved it out for more space and better light



First, we measured and marked the centre of the boat — centre from front to back I mean, not the side-to-side centre. Then we measured and marked the centre of one of the inhales and clamped it in place along the inside.

You can’t quite see it in the photo, but the ends of the inhale are set on the OTHER side of the stem for measuring. The stems still stick up a bit, so they help holding the inwale.

We clamped it as far as we could until it would not flex into position any more. Then we measured along the side of the CANOE to see how far it was (about 26” in my case), and made a mark on the inwale. Then measured forward along the inwale from that mark 26”. That SHOULD be the point at which we want to cut the inwale so that it will fit in place, snug up to the inside of the stem.

Yeah, this is hard to explain, I should have taken photos of each step.


This is repeated for the other end. Then the inwale is removed from the canoe and brought to the bench. At this point I cut the inwale to length. I then also cut a taper. The inwale needs to taper down so that it is half the width of the inside of the stem. The OTHER inwale will occupy the other half. The stem is about 5/8” wide, so I needed to taper the inwale down to 5/16”. One thing the book does NOT tell me is how LONG the taper should be. In a sense it probably doesn’t matter too much, as we will be filling that in with a deck.



Then we fitted the inwale back into position and it fit perfectly!!!
Yes I’m lying.
I needed to dismount it twice more until I was happy. But better it is too long than too short! Here it is clamped into position.


And a close-up on the one end. You can see how we also need to trim down the cedar to give us a fair curve. That is boat-build-speak for “we need to trim the cedar down to follow the line of the inwale. And yes, there is more to the term “fair curve” than that, but it’s close enough for this situation!


Next time we should be gluing the one inwale in place with epoxy — epoxy is forever, so we want to be sure before we do that! And after that the other inwale.
 
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