Skin on frame solo canoe, Day 9. Build time: 1hr.
Total build time 43 hours. Materials cost roughly $400.
14’9” long, 30” wide, 12” deep in the center. Weight 32lbs.
Frame: western red cedar longitudinals, white oak ribs, ash gunwales, laminated walnut seat from Northstar Canoes. Skin: 9oz nylon with 4 coats of 2 part polyurethane. Kneeling pad: extra large Therm-a-rest ridge rest.
I was planning on adding VHMW stem bands today, but couldn’t quite bring myself to screw that glaring white plastic onto this calm colored boat. I’m not really sure what my alternative is considering that I’m really not a fan of wooden rub strips and brass half oval is too heavy and too expensive for the job it does. So I tabled that conversation for the moment and moved on to hanging the seat.
With the nesting canoe system, the seat on the larger canoe needs to be removed for transport, so that’s mounting and un-mounting one seat per trip. In theory this is no big deal but in practice I don’t seem to have enough hands to do the job and I end up constantly dropping the little nyloc nuts and washers and getting irritated. So what I’ve done on the the last 3 canoes is to install T nuts on the bottom of my seats which has worked really well so far, although I can’t promise that the next one isn’t going to cross thread leaving me sour and grumbly. It’s darn convenient but much more field testing is needed before I can officially recommend it.
Overall this was a good build, I got re-oriented to the system, worked out a bug in the rib shaping system, and came up with a handful of general improvements to add to the course. Just building a boat for once has been almost like a vacation, but starting tomorrow the video gear comes back out and we start filming the next build and bunch of updates to the video course and plans.
We shot a lot of video on the water today so I’ll use that to talk more about how this boat handles in my next post. For now, I’ll just say I like it a lot.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
