August 11, 2010 at 7:04 pm · Filed under Freedom 15 Canoe
I finally really finished the canoe today! I hadn’t coated the inside of the canoe until this week, but timing and weather made it happen. Our garage is full of stuff now so I decided to spray S3 wr-lpu outside. It worked fine, especially since I wasn’t shooting for a perfect finish. I sprayed 3 coats, put the seats back in, and shazam! It’s all fini. I think we’ll take it with us when we go visit my folks. Maybe we’ll do a float done the Columbia River.
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September 13, 2009 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Freedom 15 Canoe, Just Stuff, Technology
César’s Bark Canoe is a fantastic NFB (National Film Board) film from 1971, produced by Bernard Gosselin. It captures César Newashish, a 67-year-old Attikamek of the Manawan Reserve north of Montreal, building a canoe solely from the materials from the forest, including birchbark, cedar splints, spruce roots and gum.
September 7, 2009 at 2:09 pm · Filed under Freedom 15 Canoe
Last weekend the family and I launched the Freedom for the first time. It wasn’t quite “finished” in that I hadn’t varnished it yet, but I wanted to wait for the weather to cool a bit before spraying the urethane. And check out that paddle in some of the pictures!
September 1, 2009 at 11:44 am · Filed under Freedom 15 Canoe
After I installed the decks, I concentrated on finishing the outwales, seat placement and thwarts. The outwale install was okay but I had a couple of issues. First, I had some gaps between the cedar hull and the ash outwales. This was just cosmetic near the top surface, and I filled them with epoxy + wood flour.
Each end of the outwales was screwed through the hull and into the deck. I used a fostner bit to counterbore the outwale. Using brass screws is tricky because they are soft and need a larger pre-drill so that it doesn’t bind before the threads catch into the deck. I used some birch dowel to fill the counterbores. I would have preferred walnut dowels but I didn’t know where to get any and I didn’t want to make them.
Next I worked on hanging the seats. I simply followed the guide from Canoecraft and didn’t come across anything unusual.
Before finishing the seats I had to replace the hardwood dowels in the corners of the caning with softwood. I shaped a bunch of tapered dowels from cedar using a Japanese rasp.
One big “oops” was when I realized that I had forgotten to remove the masking tape from underneath one of the outwales when I glued it to the hull. That meant that I had to cut and scrape a whole bunch of blue tape that was epoxied to the hull. Yuck.
For painters holes, and for attaching end ropes to the canoe, I decided to use bored dowel. I bought a 1″ birch dowel from Lee Valley. I then used a 1″ spade bit to drill through the hull. The area was wet out with thickened epoxy and the dowel was slid through the hole. Once set, I used a 1/2″ spade drill bit to bore through the dowel. The fit was pretty tight between the hull and the dowel and unfortunately on one side of the hull the fiberglass/wood was stressed and displaced when the dowel was inserted. I’m not sure if there will be any last effects, only time will tell.
Finally I varnished all of the thwarts and gunwales. I was really pleased with how the decks and gunwales turned out. The thickened epoxy I used for gap filling between the outwales and hull was a non-issue. The varnish made the wrc turn a very dark brown, which really complements the lighter gunwales that sit on either side of it.
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