Fantasy Vintage Cedar Strip Canoe Build in pic

[Just Duke]

Per your request.

[prsman23]

I need to ignore this thread....
I need another project like a hole in the head.
But a retro cedar strip canoe would be the trick for chasing small mouth bass on the fly rod. The stream near where I hunt is loaded with greedy bass.

Everyone else is doing it. Come on. Do it. What are you chicken????
Bawk bawk!

[Pb2au]

Peer pressure does it every time......
I do have a wood working project laden year ahead of me. Might as well add another.
My house was built in 1900, so if you can't make it, you sure as heck are not going to buy it.
I rebuilt the frames and trim around three of my windows last year. All hand fitted and planed cedar. All of the frames in the walls are true 2x4's petrified to stone over 114 years.I have three more to do, plus two attic windows to restore.
Might as well add awesome retro canoe to build.

[BruceB]

Lovely photos.... they make me wish I still lived in the canoe country where i grew up and lived most of my adult life.

A square-stern canoe with a small outboard is surely one of the most-efficient ways to move a heavy load that was ever designed.

I had that 18' fiberglass freighter I mentioned earlier, with the 6HP Evinrude on its square stern.

On one occasion (when the water was fairly calm), I loaded four men including myself, and five dead caribou into that craft, and apart from sitting a bit deeper in the water, it still slipped along at very close to its normal speed.... behaving as a displacement hull, of course.

As long as the people involved are not afraid of a little spray, the freighter will tote those heavy loads even in rather rough water, and often do it more safely than most regular planing-hull boats.

The Indians around Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, where I lived for several decades, still use big freighter canoes for much of their hunting, fishing and trapping. These may be as large as 26 feet with outboards up to the 35-40HP class. That lake is as much as 120 miles ACROSS, and over 500 miles long, so we're not speaking of white-water-and-portage canoeing. There are certainly lots of white-water streams flowing into Great Slave, but it's mostly white-guy tenderfeet who do the recreational-type stream paddling.

I love canoes.....

[Just Duke]

Lovely photos.... they make me wish I still lived in the canoe country where i grew up and lived most of my adult life.

A square-stern canoe with a small outboard is surely one of the most-efficient ways to move a heavy load that was ever designed.

I had that 18' fiberglass freighter I mentioned earlier, with the 6HP Evinrude on its square stern.

On one occasion (when the water was fairly calm), I loaded four men including myself, and five dead caribou into that craft, and apart from sitting a bit deeper in the water, it still slipped along at very close to its normal speed.... behaving as a displacement hull, of course.

As long as the people involved are not afraid of a little spray, the freighter will tote those heavy loads even in rather rough water, and often do it more safely than most regular planing-hull boats.

The Indians around Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, where I lived for several decades, still use big freighter canoes for much of their hunting, fishing and trapping. These may be as large as 26 feet with outboards up to the 35-40HP class. That lake is as much as 120 miles ACROSS, and over 500 miles long, so we're not speaking of white-water-and-portage canoeing. There are certainly lots of white-water streams flowing into Great Slave, but it's mostly white-guy tenderfeet who do the recreational-type stream paddling.

I love canoes.....

Bruce, I have the battery jars charged up if you have the chance to send me a telegraph.

[Just Duke]

I found the freighters you were talking about Bruce. Very Very COOL!
http://spectacularnwt.com/content/au...illage?cate=40

[Just Duke]

Cad Plans http://store.gartsideboats.com/colle...iff-design-198

[BruceB]

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!

[Just Duke]

http://www.scottcanoe.com/index.php?...d=20&Itemid=97

[Just Duke]

21 foot Scott Hudson Bay Freight canoe in Northern Maine

[Just Duke]

More Cad plan links also http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthre...freghter-canoe
This is also a prime candidate to cover this stripper on the outside with High Grade Charcoal Briquettes/French Lawn Chair Webbing From Nim France or Kevlar.
http://cncroutinganddesign.com/
Slide Show. Pop open a cold one and enjoy.
http://s877.photobucket.com/user/123...0canoe%20bulid

[BruceB]

Boy howdy.... a man could load TWO moose AND his camp outfit AND his compadres into one of those!

I'm surprised at the quoted weight of just 250 pounds in fiberglass. Still not exactly something you'd want to carry over "closely-spaced contour lines" (HILLS!), but a couple of men could manhandle it fairly easily for loading/unloading from a vehicle or trailer. VERY nice. I would have loved to own one like that, although my 18' was ample for my needs.

One of the shortcomings of the cedar/canvas canoes in daily service is that they tend to get heavier as they age. Between water-logging, or extra layers of paint, or adding fiberglass, or multiple patches, whatever.... they DO get heavier with time. This is as opposed to canoes in recreational use, where a loving and careful owner will baby the canoe, fix what needs fixing, and painstakingly refinish as needed.

Fiberglass or aluminum are more practical in heavy service (never liked aluminum very much; they are just too danged NOISY.) Still, gliding silently in a cedar-strip canoe on a calm evening is truly a sublime feeling.

[Just Duke]

Boy howdy.... a man could load TWO moose AND his camp outfit AND his compadres into one of those!

I'm surprised at the quoted weight of just 250 pounds in fiberglass. Still not exactly something you'd want to carry over "closely-spaced contour lines" (HILLS!), but a couple of men could manhandle it fairly easily for loading/unloading from a vehicle or trailer. VERY nice. I would have loved to own one like that, although my 18' was ample for my needs.

One of the shortcomings of the cedar/canvas canoes in daily service is that they tend to get heavier as they age. Between water-logging, or extra layers of paint, or adding fiberglass, or multiple patches, whatever.... they DO get heavier with time. This is as opposed to canoes in recreational use, where a loving and careful owner will baby the canoe, fix what needs fixing, and painstakingly refinish as needed.

Fiberglass or aluminum are more practical in heavy service (never liked aluminum very much; they are just too danged NOISY.) Still, gliding silently in a cedar-strip canoe on a calm evening is truly a sublime feeling.

You have a PM Bruce.

[Just Duke]

Something tells me the freighters would have been popular during the Prohibition........

[Just Duke]

Yea Bruce the freighters would have not been considered a portage boat.

[BruceB]

Yea Bruce the freighters would have not been considered a portage boat.

Quite right, at least in modern times. My 18' job was marginal, but we did manage to move it a few times on SHORT hauls between bodies of water....a few hundred yards at most. There is a grey area in size, wherein ones NEED, multiplied by his DETERMINATION (and willing helpers) can make a decision one way or the other. You are correct, though. By and large, the freighters are surely not portage-friendly.

I've read a lot about the early fur-trade days in the North. Can you imagine climbing into a big freighter canoe loaded with bales of fur, ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE, and saying to a pal on the bank,"Well, we're off to Montreal. See you in three or four years...if we survive."
Yep.... three or four thousand miles, hundreds of portages with a 26-to-30' freighter, tons of fur to haul over those trails as well the heavy canoe... and the "easy" part of the trip is paddling through the entire Great Lakes chain.... I bet Niagara was a trial, as portages go.

Many, many of those incredibly tough and durable men lie buried beside the portage trails. I lived for a long time right on one of the main east-west fur-trade routes (west of Lake Superior) and learned quite a lot about the times and the trade.

It's all a part of canoeing, I believe... even in our modern Kevlar-or-whatever craft, we are not all that far removed from the days of birchbark and pine gum. The waters are the same, and the required skills are largely the same. That's a large part of the charm of it all.

Reading the journals of Sir John Franklin's explorations of the North in the early 1800s, I was amazed on reading of his travels on country that I know.

His party camped one evening at the mouth of the Slave River, where it flows into Great Slave Lake on its SOUTH shore.

The next evening, the party camped at a place I know as "Tartan Rapids", a few miles north of Yellowknife.

Gentlemen, HEAR THIS:

those two campsites are roughly 140 miles apart!!!!!

That is, in a single 24-hour period, they CROSSED Great Slave Lake and made about ten more miles UPSTREAM on the Yellowknife River. Talk about tough men.... my imagination fails me, because I KNOW those waters.

[6bg6ga]

I think a large boat with an inboard would be good.

[Just Duke]

The 24 foot Chief's three Freighter Canoes
http://www.chiefskugaid.org/the-chie...er-canoes.html

[Just Duke]

Here's the bigger canoe like you told me to make Randy. 22 foot!
http://forums.wcha.org/showthread.ph...ight=freighter

[HollandNut]

some nice canoes there ..