Day 10, Row/sail canoe, version 2. Build time: 7hrs.
Spent the morning making VHMW skid-strips which I’ll talk about and show in another post.
After that I stripped the frame and took the opportunity to weigh all the components separately which much to my surprise came out lighter than my last boat despite using heavier, larger dimension wood. This really illustrates how much scale changes size. This boat is a 97% scale of the last one but will likely lose 15% capacity because of it, an intentional choice to keep things inside of easy cartop weight and also just to reduce the slightly chubby feel of the last boat.
I also switched out the bow seat with the old center seat and fitted the new center seat frame that I’m almost done varnishing.
Skinned the boat in the afternoon using a 12oz skin on this one which is something I almost never do because the 12oz is a lot harder to work with and is usually overkill, resulting in unnecessary weight for no good reason. I made an exception this time because I wanted to push every aspect of the build to its upper weight and durability limit just so I have a sense of the finished weight of a hard working double vs a light one. Also, this boat is going to live outside continuously exposed to UV which tends to be hard on any boat, and I’d prefer not to re-skin it before the 6-7 year mark. I’d also like to run class III water in it.
One thing that’s weird about the 12oz (1050 denier) from skinboats.org is how much it’s lost it’s stretch over the years. I used to be able to pull it 4 inches and sew it on dry and get a tight boat. In fact I’ve seen it crush frames when sewn on wet. Last ten years though, I can’t get it to stretch more than an inch soaking wet. It still works, but I gotta pull HARD on it. The lighter stuff is much nicer to work with and is what I normally use. It will take a direct hit on a submerged barbed wire fence at full speed, something I learned the hard way paddling in a flood the same day I almost became the first person to ever be run over by a semi truck while paddling a kayak.
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