Day 3, Skin-on-frame rower-sailer. Build time: 7hrs.
Decided to back up and rework the boat today. A little narrower a little shallower. 40.5/15 It looks nicer and now I can get all of the ribs out of an 8 foot plank, with the shortest ribs being just below the length of the falloff for the longer ribs. This stuff matters considering the price of bending oak. The framing was also too sparse and now it will be just strong enough. I flipped an old nickel to help me make the final sizing decisions. I realized that one of the oak planks that I cut up yesterday was full of hidden cracks that opened up during the night,so I fed the beast a new plank and then used the checked ribs to spend the rest of the day bending in test ribs and looking at shapes. I’m not sure my canoe shaping system is going to work at this size, It seems like once I get past a 5 to 1 length to beam and especially in larger sizes the mathematic shaping system starts to fall apart. Specifically the rib heights at the ends start to fall off. Interestingly for a normal canoe with a couple inches of rocker in the ends, this could end up being perfect, just build the boat compensating for the sheer but not the rocker and then let the shaping anomaly do the work. I’ll have to get somebody to build a full-size wider tandem canoe to test that hypothesis. (Anyone want free plans?) But that doesn’t really help me with my little rowboat here. I could of course fix it in a half an hour just by bending ribs in by eye, but then it can’t be reproduced with the system and wouldn’t be useful to my students. I’m tired, I’ll revisit this in the morning.
“Remember, it’s your job to waste wood.” – Girlfriend
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