Skin on frame solo canoe, Day 5. Build time: 7hrs Brian, 1.5hrs Liz.
Tied the stringers on today with help from Liz. Stringering a boat with lots of ribs and stringers is always a little anxiety provoking because it seems like it’s going to take forever but it’s really just not that bad. It took both of us less than three hours total to finish the job.
People often ask what will happen if one of the continuous lashings breaks. The first answer is that it’s surprisingly rare but the second one is that nothing would happen because the skin is essentially lightly glued to the outside of the frame which isolates the lashings from each other. There’s nothing wrong with tying individual lashings it just takes about five times longer, which is about four times longer than I want to be spending on the job.
After that I added a bit of progressive rocker at the ends and did my final shaping on the keel before gluing it on permanently and lashing it down to the frame. I’ve been making very slow changes to the rib length formula to compensate for the increased longitudinal shrinkage of the longer ribs in the middle and I’m very happy to see that I seem to have landed on the correct answer.
I also glued some blocks to the inside of the gunnels to reinforce the area the seat will hang from.
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