In the name of space saving and other committments in the near future, I’ve decided that I should get rid of my strongback. If you’re interested, leave a comment below!
This strongback worked very well for me. Once the beam was put onto the legs, the legs were easy to adjust for contours in the floor. These legs were a big improvement over the first ones that I made – more ramblings on this can be found here.
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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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.
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!
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.
After installing the inwales I turned my attention to the decks. As usual, I pretty much followed the words of wisdom found in Canoecraft. However, there are a few interesting bits to mention. First, I managed to find a nice piece of sapele at a local lumber store. There was about 1 board.ft sitting in a bin of scrap wood that they use for stacking lumber. I still had to pay for the wood, but at least I only needed to buy a small piece. It cost me $10.
I resorted to a few more sluggo special jigs for the deck glue-up and shaping:
I had some problems screwing the decks into the inwales. First I predrilled with a 1/8″ bit for #8 screws. I got a couple of screws in, but then I broke one. Next I predrilled 1/8″ into the deck, and then 5/32″ through the inwale. I still broke a screw. Finally I settled on this pattern: start with a 3/8″ forstner bit for countersink, drill 5/32″ through the inwale and deck, then finally drill 3/16″ through the inwale.
I managed to shape the decks ok and the fit was pretty good for me. I had some Elmers wood filler that did an excellent job of filling gaps between the cherry and sapele:
And used thickened epoxy for gaps between the decks and the inwales. Once it’s sanded I think it will look quite okay.
