More progress on the new pedal drive canoe prototype. Started the day by opening up some oak billets that I let sit in plastic for too long, and was not surprised to find them covered in mold. Fortunately, after resawing them into ribs and rounding the edges very little of that actually remained.
After that, I made a set of test ribs, which lets me check the shaping and also determine the best steaming time for that particular batch of ribs. This is a critical part of the process, because even the same species of wood can have vastly different optimal bending times just depending on the moisture content, the density of the grain, and the ambient working conditions. Rules of thumb just don’t work here and best results are always obtained by testing each batch before committing to a full bend.
I was also trying to decide between two slightly different variables in the rib length formula for this particular size canoe. Ultimately I gave up and decided to flip a coin a couple times which told me that I should go halfway in between the two sizes.
Next to cut all the actual ribs to length and clean up the workspace for tomorrows bend. If I can get motivated for it, I’ll try to make a video of the bending process and put a chunk of it here and the full video on YouTube.
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