satisfaction and the odd challenge

Adding strips to the old canoe is a bit of love and hate. Mostly it’s fun to work and very satisfying to see the shape of the boat come together.

The not-so-good stuff includes little frustrations such as gaps between strips and a few small challenges. One sort of big “oops” was when I realized that my stems were too high. When I originally put the forms and stems together, the stems sat about 3/16" higher than the adjacent forms and I figured that was great because it matched the thickness of my strips. As I progressed with the stripping it became obvious that this was wrong. Very wrong.

I did a bit of detective work to figure out what had a happened. I think it was combination of a couple of little things (slightly off in tracing the stem pattern, stems not sitting quite flush on the strongback, etc). All of it would have been easily avoidable if I was looking out for it when the forms and stems were assembled. That’s history though, the question was what to do about it?

I decided the best thing to do was to shave down the top of the stems by 1/8" or so to match the forms. This would ensure that the hull was fair. I wasn’t too sure what would happen with fitting the outside stem later on, but I’ll deal with that when I get there. If it’s a problem I’ll add some wood to the outside stem or maybe a bit of epoxy + wood flour to fill the gap.

One of the last challenges with stripping was the twist in the strips at “the turn of the bilge.” This is where the strips are fairly flat along the bottom of the hull in the middle of the boat but as the strip nears the stem they need to twist almost 90degrees where it ends at the stem. Some creative clamping helped fix this. I also hit the ends of the strips with a heat gun in order to pre-shape some twist in strips before attaching them to the boat.