CONTINUED —
June 7 Progress.
Just two of us today, my friend and myself. He brought his own canoe which he’d built about eight years ago. It was off the same forms as this one. He brought it so that we could take the measurements off of it for the seat placement — easier to just copy an identical canoe than figure things out from the book.
So he just quickly dismounted his seats and used them as templates to cut our seats.
Meanwhile, I worked on fitting the decks. Or tried to. Turns out that I really should not have tapered the inwales the way I did. Look at how they compare to the deck. It was going to be a real bear trying to get those to fit smoothly together.
(Of course you don’t HAVE to have decks, you could just cap the ends, or something else, but we wanted decks.)
I took the spare deck and traced out the lines, and cut them out on the bandsaw. I wanted to test everything here before doing anything to the real decks. This was a wise move! as the results were horrible. First, the bandsaw in the shop is really not well tuned. But still, to fit to the inwales I needed to cut this weird curve on the deck, and getting everything to fit was not going to be easy. I was in despair for a time!
I came up with this solution, which my friend agreed would work fine. The Deck’s current size is almost perfect for fitting there at the end of the boat. So we decided to just cut out the inwales at the ends, and fit the deck in, and it would serve both as inwale and deck there.
(Good thing we had NOT glued the inwales in place, just screwed them. Actually even more good, as we later looked and realized that the inwale curve was just not right in a few places and we need to adjust them up or down. Partly that was our own inexperience, and partly that was the fact that the ash inwale just wanted to curve it’s own way.)
Here is one deck fitted into place. I cut the point off the end, cut out the inwales, and angled the sides on the belt sander to somewhat match the angle of the canoe sides. This is a loose fitting, but with screws and epoxy it will fit very snugly.
Meanwhile my friend was busy — not so many photos of that, though. He trimmed and fit the yoke into place. It is just about 2” in front of the centre of the canoe. You want just a bit more weight in the back of the canoe for when you portage, so that the nose of the canoe sits further up, so as not to block your view as you carry it. It is currently held in place with some wood screws. These will be replaced with bolts next time.
One thing that I did NOT get on a photo… With the yoke in place, the top of the canoe pulled IN a bit. We now have some tumblehome! Took me ages to grasp the meaning of that term. It means that the canoe actually bulges outward a bit below the gunnels. I’m not going to even try to explain more than that!
Here is the rear seat with this vertical standoffs, sitting loose in position.
Second last thing we did was mix up some epoxy, and toss in a lot of thickener until it was like mashed potato consistency, and then smear it around the decks and around the hull and screw and glue the decks into place. We got a nice tight fit on both decks.
(and yes, I know we need to put a hole in there probably — to serve as a finger hole and also a place to attach a rope for tying onto a car and/or holding the painter.
Last thing we did was pull in my friends canoe for a repair. One of his scarf joints had opened up, so we cleaned it out, and packed it full of epoxy and clamped it — not too tight so we don’t starve the joint. Hopefully we got it right.
And just for fun, here is a look at his canoe — I love how he put in those thing alternating-coloured strips along the waterline. Gorgeous, but also a lot of work.
(and I would like to apologize for the poor photo quality of a lot of shots. With the recent demise of my shop camera, I've been using an iPod for a number of photos.)
