Fantasy Vintage Cedar Strip Canoe Build in pic

[prsman23]

Hey guys. I have canoe related news! A much needed bump for this awesome thread! I've decided to build two canoes and give one to the local boy scouts. I am going to launch a kickstarter project next week, so I'd like some feedback and see what ya'll think!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...token=c2b1df74

Any ideas to make the presentation better? I'm starting a blog and a twitter to try to gain a little excitement. I'll make my own post in the special projects section. Just giving the fellow canoe lovers a little something to look at. Maybe get some tips for the blog and the two canoes!

[Just Duke]

Great news Jay. Did you paint the Wolf/Eagle pic?

[Just Duke]

[prsman23]

Duke I wish! Bought that at a local thrift shop. It now resides in the loading room

[prsman23]

shameless plug

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/show...87#post2892787

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...anoes-one-dude

2canoes1dude.wordpress.com

[Just Duke]

shameless plug

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/show...87#post2892787

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...anoes-one-dude

2canoes1dude.wordpress.com

We will be watching.

[Just Duke]

Looks like this might just become fact than fantasy for us after all.

[prsman23]

I started a new kickstarter after someone more generous than I can fathom promised to pledge $500. So I'm over 1,000 now and will be close to the $1500. If I hit the 1500 I'm building two boats for the boy scouts. At the moment I am planning on one. So yeah. This is getting real!

[Just Duke]

I'm back to normal. Miss Barbie is a broken mess with a 16 inch titanium rods inside the Tibia bone and three screws in the upper foot bone and will never be able to work again at the job she so loved.

[Just Duke]

This Vintage Runabout Replica looks like a fun build.

[Just Duke]

[Just Duke]

[Just Duke]

[257]

I went to a garage sale down the road from me and met a young man who was putting the finish on his second one, they were absolutely stunning a tremendous amount of work bending and molding every thing

[W.R.Buchanan]

My Father and his older Bro were partners in a 36 ish foot Gar Wood in the mid 50's. I was 4 or 5 at the time but I remember them spending many weekends sanding on the boat. I was basically a pest at the time so my mother kept me away from them while they worked.

In my 30's I got my father to tell me of this boat.

The boat was an Forward/Aft Cockpit Gar Wood and it had an Allison V1710 out of a P38 that they had bought surplus for $100.The original engine was a Liberty and the main accomplishment of their brief ownership was installing the new engine and doing a lot of sanding on the exterior of the hull. It was entirely made of Mahogany.

They sold the boat to a guy from Detroit who eventually finished it out. One summer I was visiting my dad in Michigan when I was 8 we all got to go for a ride in the thing on the Detroit River during the hydroplane races.

When he shoved the throttle to it as we left the marina chills went way up your spine. Believe me, the thing hauled ****! and I still can recall the sensation of speed of the boat.

He hadn't installed a rear windscreen when we rode in it, and sitting in the rear cockpit with the cold Michigan wind and that Allison blasting away 3 feet in front of you was less than pleasant for the better part of our hour long ride.

But looking back it was a cool experience that I am sure helped to shape me in ways I didn't understand at the time, and the allure of varnish finishes that are a foot deep still intrigue me. I think that may be part of my attraction to finishing gunstocks, as boats are way too big a project for me.

I actually sanded on a friends wooden hull for and entire Saturday once. I actually stripped an area about 4 x 20 Feet and I hurt for a week. The boat was a 65 foot Trawler and I was one of many he Tom Sawyered into working on it for free beer. He never did get the hull completely stripped and eventually sold the boat . This was a massive project that would have taken 20 guys a month to accomplish.

Boats are big projects and the workload goes up exponentially with the length. Anyone thinking they are just going to knock one out in a few days is in for a big surprise. However if you've got the time and the talent and the fortitude, the rewards of creating something of immense beauty that will outlast you is very substantial.

They also take a lot of money!

I wish I'd had the money when I was younger to pursue that type of project. Now I've got the money but I just don't have the strength for a project that big. My Jeep project has been pretty big and it is all I can do to finish it.

I was into airplanes as well and they are a lot like boats in scope of project. Never built one of those either.

Man has created some pretty neat stuff.

Randy

[quilbilly]

Personally I think Alaska yellow cedar would be a better choice than red cedar. Problem is that it is a specialty wood that is hard to find but is one of them best boat building woods there is because it is so rot resistant (even more than redwood). It is very difficult to put a finish on due to its high oil content but it can be done. Since yellow cedar does exist in the Olympic Mtns. and the Washington Cascacades above 3500 feet, a few local mills have always handled it. My first thought to find some from a distance would be to give a call to Mary's River Lumber in Montesano, Wa. since one of their specialties is red cedar (I sold a bunch to them years back from our property before we built the house). I actually replanted a couple little yellow cedars while replacing the trees we logged after our selective logging operation. Yellow cedar is super slow growing.

[prsman23]

Honestly with the fiberglassing the wood resistant to rot doesn't play that big of a part. Or for structural purposes.

[MaryB]

I got to paddle one of these across a large part of Lake Superior one summer, copy of the canoe the Voyagers used for the fur trade



specs for one http://northwoodscanoe.com/index.php...=46&Itemid=228 6,000 pound capacity for 10 inch freeboard.

[Just Duke]

What a co-incidence!

You see that brown house on the skyline behind the canoe?

I (personally) BUILT THAT HOUSE!

We lived there from about '75 to '82, after which we built a bigger and more-remote home about twenty miles out in the bush, on another pleasant lake-shore.

Note how tiny and sparse the trees are? The northern limit of trees is only a few miles to the north.

The photo is taken in the Old Town area of Yellowknife, where there are many float-plane bases. The water is part of Yellowknife Bay, on Great Slave's north shore. 9.3 Al, NVCurmudgeon, my two brothers and I, departed by Twin Otter from that very dock in 2010, en route to a week's fishing at a lodge forty miles to the east.

Because Yellowknife was originally largely supplied by barges from Hay River, on the south side of Great Slave, the early settling of the town was close to the water.... starting back around the 1920s.

No road reached Yellowknife until the early 1960s, so the lake was extremely important. Cat trains hauled freight and supplies across Great Slave in winter, with bulldozers towing strings of sled-mounted "cabooses" over that 130-plus miles of ice.

Open water at our "lake house" only extended from early June to late September... the rest of the time, it was frozen. Ergo, the boating season was SHORT!

The "canoe" you pictured is closer to a "boat" than most of the big freighters I was thinking of. Still, it gives a good idea of what "canoe construction" can do, when applied to larger craft.

Adventurous times!

I have regret that I did not start or finish this project before you leaving us Bruce. When I do I will always remember this thread and your participation in it.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Duke,

Think 12' flat bottom boat with a 18 hp evinrude motor on it. Cheap, functional and easy to obtain.

I bet they could do eighteenth century violin tone on an electronic synthesizer, but the bottom doesn't look like falling out of the Stradivarius market any time soon.

Was "bottom falling out" the right expression to use?