Project: 11 9 Canadian Canoe |
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I have never built a
boat before, in fact you could say that my carpentry skills cater for the rough
end of the market (shelves, bunk beds, etc.). On the other hand, I have always
thought that it would be nice to build a boat. |
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My children, Katy (aged 10) and Livi (aged
8) are strong swimmers and are well used to sailing with me, but have never
shown the slightest interest in learning to sail for themselves. Up until this
year, they have had a cheap toy inflatable in which they would row, with strict
instructions not to get more than 100m from the shore. I was beginning to think
that this was rather limiting, and started to look for advertisements for
small, lightweight, second-hand canoes. I didn't have much success at this so I
looked at kits for canoes. Kits seem to be outside my budget. |
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I was idly rummaging around on the
internet one lunchtime and searched for images of canoes, to try to learn more
about them. My search turned up a picture of the 156 canoe on this
website. This looked more like what I was after, but I thought that this size
of boat may be a bit big for the children so I sent an e-mail to UK Epoxy
Resins asking if the plans would scale down to about 12 to suit my
children |
By the time I next looked at my e-mail, I
had two e-mails from Rob Hewitt indicating that he was in the process of
lofting a new boat to suit my kids. OK, I know when I have found the right
solution to my problems; I ordered the resin kit. |
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The internet proved interesting when
trying to buy plywood to BS1088. The variability in prices is quite surprising
(more than a factor of three difference between different suppliers, so it pays
to shop around). I found Arnold Laver in Leeds would sell me 4mm marine ply
(with the BS1088 mark) for a little under £10 per sheet. So I bought my
three sheets for a total of about £33 incl. VAT. At this point I made a
small but interesting mistake; I didn't get the wood yard to cut it down the
middle for me, but loaded it straight onto the roof bars of my car as full
8 x 4 sheets. The mistake became noisily apparent at about 40mph!
It was a long journey home |
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I had not really given enough
thought to where I might build a boat. We have a house and a garage and a back
garden and a place to park the car in front of the garage and a small outhouse
cum workshop. The garage is home to my beloved sailing dinghy (heron class;
about 35 years old). The garden is wet when it rains and hasn't enough shade
for working with epoxy when it is sunny. None of the rooms in the house were
available, (or really big enough, anyway) and the outhouse is too small to
handle a single sheet of plywood comfortably let alone a canoe |
Zen and the
art of canoe building. |
So I used different spaces for
different jobs. Cutting the sheets and preparing the scarf joints was done in
the garden (between three very heavy showers). It was necessary to turn the
dinghy into a workbench, by running the sections of an extension-ladder fore
and aft and then crossing these with some loft boards that I had spare from a
project. This provided a space to glue the scarf joints and to mark out the
strakes and cut them out. I did most of the marking out perched on the plywood
itself in the limited space under the garage roof.
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 Planing the
Scarfs |
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Because I don't
possess four pairs of hands, I used weights (read old paint tins)
to encourage a thin piece of wood to conform to the curve that I needed so that
I could join the dots. |
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Putting the strakes together was fun.
It was very satisfying to watch the canoe grow from those unlikely looking
shapes. It took shape very rapidly over a period of a few days, even though I
only had a couple of hours each day to work on it. At first, I found finishing
the joint with glass and epoxy a bit stressful, as I worried that my precious
store of epoxy was going down too fast, and I found that the smallest easily
mixable quantity of epoxy was starting to get difficult to work by the time I
finished it. After a bit, I allowed myself to work faster even if it did mean
that the glass tapes weren't as straight as I would have liked. |
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Next came the central rib, the gunwales and the thwart
(about £30 worth of timber). Again, it was fun laminating the rib, and
then trimming it to shape. The hideous mess that it looked when I first put it
together turned into a pleasant enough object under the influence of a plane, a
spokeshave and a sander. Likewise, the thwart was easy enough to make but then
came the gunwales! I had never bent wood ( I mean not bent it to give it a
specific shape which it was then supposed to hold) and I found this
problematic. In the end I solved the problem by choosing thinner material and
laminating it in. That way it was easy enough. I could have saved myself a few
weeks of head-scratching if I had thought of doing it this way to start with.
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 Starting the centre frame |
 The three layers laminated up |

Fitting the inwale |
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The next job was to cover the bottom
with glass cloth and epoxy it into place. I evicted the dinghy from the garage
to where I normally park the car and worked in the garage. The job just did not
go quite how I might have expected (I expect that it gets easier with practice)
It is a bit like wallpapering with lots of surfaces that are nowhere near flat.
My estimate of an hour and a half to complete the job over-ran by about four
hours. After that, things got easy. I was no longer afraid to put the canoe
down onto anything that was not reasonably clean and with its gunwales, rib and
thwart, it made an encouragingly strong sound when tapped. |
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I had been feeling rather that I should have been
letting the children get involved in the project, but much of the work was
being done when they were in bed, and besides, the scope for wasting the
precious materials or making an irrevocable mistake had seemed too high. Now, I
could at least let them finish the inside with epoxy and let them paint the
outside |
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As I wanted the boat to be easily visible at a
distance of half a kilometre or more, I specified that the paint job must be
reasonably bright but left the colour scheme up to the children. They chose
bright yellow with green Dalmatian spots. They did most of the painting. The
paint took me over my nominal budget of £200 as I spent £12 on
proper yacht undercoat, about £14 on the two colours (for which I used
domestic quality oil-based gloss) and a topcoat of yacht varnish (another
£5) Rob Hewitt supplied me with some powder which made a pleasant black
filler when mixed with epoxy (thanks, Rob) and I used this to fill the space
between the inner and outer gunwale to seal the top edge of the ply. |
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The boat was finally finished just a few days before we were
due to go on holiday to a campsite on the edge of Ullswater. Trailing the
dinghy with an extra boat on top was no hassle, except that rear-view was now
limited to the wing mirrors. (This was another reason why I wanted a short
canoe; the dinghy is only 114 so a big canoe would not travel well
that way.) We had unloaded the tent and got perhaps about half of the pegs
driven in when I gave way to the childrens demands that the canoe should be
launched. Carrying the thing is trivial, once you have got it over your head
like a hat. The thwart rests on your shoulders and it balances with a very
slight tendency to tip backward. As the whole thing only weighs about 30 lbs,
it can be carried quite a long way like this with no discomfort. |
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The children got in and moved about the
water in a haphazard sort of way. They did not seem to notice that they
couldn't steer it and seemed quite happy with it. After a bit they came back
and let me have a go. I have only been in canoes a couple of times before and
found it difficult to put into practice all the stuff I had read about
J strokes etc. However I did manage to get to where I wanted even
if an onlooker might have thought that I was beating against the wind. |
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On day two, we put our wet suits on
and went for a capsize. I wanted to see how far it could tip before it reached
the point of no return. I also wanted to see if the children could
get back into it if they fell out, whether they could get it back to land if it
filled with water, etc. With one child, the point of no return isn't reached
until water comes over the gunwale, so that is as stable as it can possibly be.
In fact, Livi, after some practice, got to the stage where she could paddle the
canoe so that she was out of her depth, jump out of it and scramble back in
with only perhaps an inch of water in the bottom to show that she had done it.
With two children the point of no return is about when water is level with the
gunwale. With one adult and one child, it threw us out when the water was about
an inch from the outer gunwale (but then it was overloaded by about 20kg
according to the specification that Rob had given me). |
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After I had established that they could
move the canoe in the direction that they wanted even if it was full of water
and issued instruction about what to do in an emergency, and established
techniques for getting back in if they fell out, etc., we let them go
free range over the part of the lake that is visible from the
campsite. Over the course of the holiday, they got quite good at steering it
and could move around the water with a reasonable degree of precision. They
visited the islands on the lake and particularly enjoyed the bobberty
bobs (the wake of the Ullswater steamers). They were easy to
pick out from a distance as a bright yellow banana with an orange blob at each
end. Since we came back, they have read Swallows and Amazons. |
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Material Copyright
© 2000 UK Epoxy Resins |