Construction - it's contagious

I had been warned by Paul at Fyne Boats that building kayaks and canoes is addictive, but I had not realised that it is also contagious. Brother Mike has started a build, and his experiences so far appear below as a guest entry.

Whatever you choose to build, you are likely to need to create 'fair' curves and I favour the following method for holding a batten in place.

The 'pots' are filled with lead and weight about 1.7Kg. The base of each pot has 4 screws that protrude a small distance from within the pot. These provide a stable base on a wooden work surface while being resistant to sideways pressure.

Anyway, enough excitement from me - some thoughts from Mike.

Guest Blogger

Mike Griffiths (guest blogger) starts a chronicle of his canoe construction.

The project is to build a canoe for paddling on the great rivers of France – which is where I live. The chosen design comes from a book titled “The Canoe Shop” by Chris Kulczycki and the 16ft Sassafras lapstrake (clinker) canoe is constructed from 6mm marine ply and epoxy resin.

I am going to skip lightly over the trials of locating reasonably priced marine ply in France in general and in the rural ‘department ‘of the Dordogne in particular. Suitable timber merchants and boat chandlers are in very short supply this far from the sea. However, West epoxy resin and five sheets of marine ply eventually turned up so the project could move from the conceptual phase to the practical – or to put it another way, it was time to stop faffing about and actually get some boat building work done.

I was aware that the canoe plans (and in particular the table of offsets) were a product of the USA but once my pencil was sharpened ready to start marking out the boat planks on a sheet of ply it was still a bit of a shock to realise that I was expected to do this in inches – to the nearest 16th * (see below). Fortunately, my toolbox came up with a slightly rusted metal rule calibrated to that great old British measure. Just to be sure (I had been caught out with quarts once) I checked that US inches were the same. I found out that, while they were not quite the same, the tiny difference could safely be ignored. I was also most entertained to discover that in July 1959 the US inch had been redefined to be exactly 2.54 centimetres long. Now you would have though that it might have occurred to our US cousins that re-calibrating one of their fundamental units of measurement to a size defined by an international standard might be a good basis from which to go the whole hog but – well clearly that did not happen.

The canoe is constructed from five pairs of identical planks (or more properly strakes, see below **). The bow and stern sections of each plank are identical so ‘lofting’ the lines of the canoe requires you to lay out one half of each of the five different planks on a single sheet of 2.4 metre by 1.2 metre ply. The idea is that you will then cut the design out from four sheets of ply clamped together thus ending up with 20 half planks ready to be scarfed together into ten full planks, each about 16ft (4.8 metres) long. Hefting the first sheet of ply down onto my office floor to mark out the design convinced me that handling and cutting four thicknesses together was going to require a little more support than the general ramshackle collection of collapsible benches and props I have used for woodworking in the past. So the first proper construction task is going to be knocking up a suitable bench from some spare timbers and a couple of part sheets of flooring grade chipboard that are, fortuitously, to be found in the barn.

Tools are another issue as well. It is clear from my copy of “The Canoe Shop” that a reasonable number of woodworking tools was going to be required to complete the cutting and shaping of the marine ply. This is one of those temptation moments – on the strength of a single project you suddenly get giddy and start to plan the purchase of one of everything. Fortunately common sense prevailed and a sensible evaluation of the tools already available suggested a much reduced shopping list. This was a chance to learn to use that router that has been sitting on a shelf waiting for it’s opportunity but it was clear that I was going to need a new fine toothed saw plus a low angled block plane for cutting the scarfs. Clamps were another issue – it looks like fitting the inwales and outwales was going to be one of those jobs where you just can’t have too many clamps. The book suggests that between 16 and 32 clamps would be adequate but that you would need twice as many if you wanted to glue on both gunwales at once. I found I had four good G clamps which left me with something of a deficit. Unfortunately the season for “les vides grainier” (the equivalent of car boot sales here in France – garage sales I think they are in the US) is just about over; so filling in that gap might prove more difficult and costly than one would hope.

Anyway – it is time to start putting pencil marks on a piece of plywood – the first step of many towards conjuring a canoe from the sheets of board leaning against my office bookcase. Enough of procrastination! Now where did I put that pencil I sharpened?

* I must admit that to a software developer like myself halves, quarters, eights and sixteenths have a certain binary appeal but when you get down to it millimetres rule. I did think of converting the offsets to the metric system but with some 90 points to plot one is almost certain to introduce an error. In any case, building a lapstrake canoe has a certain anachronistic appeal – so why not go the whole hog.

** While the 5 planks forming one side of this canoe should properly be called strakes the individual timbers are named (from the bottom) the garboard plank, the first broad plank, the second broad plank, the third broad plank and the sheer plank. Which clears the naming up nicely I think – strakes they are then.