Marc's Miscellanea

So the seat hangers are like this. Little H shaped brackets that are angled in three dimensions to match the curves of the canoe approximately. The top is bolted to the inwhale with the threaded inserts I installed way back when I made the gunwhales. The seat frame rests on the lower horizontal piece and has two small bolts that go through both parts to hold them in place.

There it is in place. It lines up with my masking tape alignment tool.

Add a seat frame to it…

and install.

I want to have the seats covered with a waxed canvas piece which gets laced underneath. But I want the canoe in the water even more, so I made some plywood covers. These will let me use the canoe now while I figure out how to sew the seat covers I actually want.

They’re just friction fit in place with some blocks of wood on the underside.

A nice clear piece of Douglas fir is going to be my first thwart. I say first, because I have a feeling that this is going to take a few tries to get right. It’ll probably be something that only experience on some portages will tell. Luckily it’s an easy part to swap in and out.

I just drew out the lines for it by guessing what looked right. No idea how this will fit my neck and shoulders.

Kerfs down to the lines allow the waste to be popped out easily with a chisel. If you have a bandsaw, then congratulations. I don’t have a bandsaw, yet.

I start shaping by chamfering the corners. Then I mark out centre lines and go to town with an axe to make the chamfers meet the lines. No photos of the axe fury unfortunately.

But this is where the axe got me to in a matter of minutes. Right tool for the job.

The sloyd knife and spokeshave do a nice job of turning the axed surface into fair curves.

It’s going to take some finagling to get the ends to fit nicely with the curved and angled inwhales. Can’t wait to get rid of that cedar 2×4 that’s been my thwart for almost a year. Soon to come. It’s getting so close I can taste it.

Take that Heath Robinson !

Meet my friend the seat jig. This contraption of clamps and squares is how you figure out exactly how long each section of a square frame needs to be in order to fit perfectly into a space that is curved in all three dimensions. It also lets you figure out how high you want the seats. Too high and the boat gets tippy fast, and the water is far away from you so your paddle doesn’t reach as deeply. If it’s too low than there’s no room for your feet or gear underneath.

For this design and my body I came up with 25cm. Based on some experiments with a plank and some buckets. When I set up the seat jig for this height it looks just right inside the canoe.

The short stretchers get tenons.

Which fit mortises in the long bearers.

Making the seat frames is good fun. It’s back to woodworking and joinery, and less finishing.

I’m finally getting to use some of that pin cherry I milled up ages ago for the trim. Since it got ixnayed for gunwhales I’m glad I can still make use of it for seats. It’s beautiful wood to work with. Cuts like butter.

The seat parts are joined together with mortise and tenons. I made up each one with the long bearers a few centimetres too long to be trimmed to fit upon installation.

Which comes out looking like this. That is friction fit at this point. The blue tape is the reference layout that I made with the seat jig.

I’ve made a discovery that my inwhale installation has proved to have given me an unforseen hurdle. Because of the tumblehome curving back on itself at the height my seats need to be, I won’t be able to just run long bolts up through blocks into the inwhale like I had planned. The curvature makes it so the bolts would be interfering with the hull.

So I’m going to need to come up with some creative hangers. Which will add a bit more weight I’m afraid.

This past month has seen lots of varnishing. Many coats of varnish getting thinly wiped on, inside and out. Hull and trim. Each scupper painstakingly varnished with a rag wrapped around a popsicle stick.

There are no pictures. The boat is just getting shinier and smoother little by little.

I’m using Varathane water based ‘Diamond Wood Finish’. The outdoor version, and full gloss. It’s very nice to work with as it cleans up nicely with water and doesn’t stink. But it goes on very thin. So many applications are required. It also dries very quick, so you can get a couple applications on in a day.

So, back to that canoe I’m building…

Haven’t posted on it in awhile. Mostly because I haven’t made progress on it for awhile. Not for lack of trying.

I started out with some nice pieces of curly maple which I planned to use as the decks. I messed around with them for ages until I got something I liked. Then one of them developed a check that started spreading. It wasn’t going to be salvageable. Since the decks tie the ends of the boat together they’re pretty important structurally. The eye bolts that go in there take all the strain of the boat being snugged down on top of a vehicle or being lined through rapids. Not a place you want to have a split.

So I scrapped those and got a couple more pieces. Those I messed up in shaping and the fit ended up being too sloppy. Into the wood stove they go.

Having used up my supply of seasoned curly maple, I was in a bit of a pickle. Then I came across some cedar cutoffs that were almost the right shape. I reasoned that if I made them thicker and had the excess go below the inwhales inside the boat I could keep the flush look I wanted, have enough wood to back the bolts and tie the ends together, and save some grams in the process.

So cedar it became.

Each deck piece had a knot in it, and I tried to make it a feature by centring it and having the flowing grain around them sort of match the lines of the boat. Sort of looks like ripples I think. That’s what I’m telling myself. And you folks reading. It’s ripples.

So after getting them (carefully and slowly this time) fit to their respective recesses, I had to mortise in the shape of the inwhales on the bottoms. The inwhales are half cut away under the decks, to account for the thickness of the original maple decks. So there’s a sort of double step thing happening in the underside of each deck.

I thought I had taken a picture of this, but I can’t find it anywhere. I’ll update this post if I come across it later.

This is what the top looks like after dry fitting. It’s almost flush. I left it here so that I could sand it all flush after the blobs of epoxy were all over it. No need to sand things twice. Hate sanding, I do.

So  I waited a couple weeks after my brass hardware to arrive. Then upon its appearance I made up a router template to cut a mortise which it will fit in exactly. No room for wiggling. That is a piece of scrap that is the same thickness as my decks if you’re wondering. I didn’t use that scabby a piece for the real thing. It took five iterations with additional layers of tape shims on the template to get it dialed in to the point where I had to press the pad eye into its socket.

The hole for the bolt is a slightly loose fit by the way. Only the long oval is snug. The bolt hole needs to be sealed with epoxy during the bedding process so water can’t penetrate the decks that way when the boat is stored upside down.

Here’s the real deck, with hardware dry fit. You can see the underside of the deck has already been sealed with epoxy. When it gets installed with epoxy, I don’t want to have any nooks or crannies of unsealed wood. The top surface will get sealed after it’s sanded flush with the gunwhales. Then the brass eye will be coated in paste wax and bedded with epoxy as well. Once the epoxy starts to set, the bolt gets pulled out (paste wax lets it release cleanly) so that it’s not a permanent fixture. But the hole is sealed and a perfect fit for the bolt. Water can seep in there and won’t rot the wood. At least not for many decades hopefully.

Glued in.

Sealed with epoxy.

Cleaned up.

You can see between the last two photos that I got the gunwhales trimmed and rounded off. I put a small triangle of wood in the gap before the stem and brought the radius of the gunwhales to just touch the tip of that triangle.

Having things sanded smooth and clean here now lets you see the end grain of the laminated inner and outer stems. Overmolded decks, which are pretty common would hide those construction details. I’m sure lots prefer that, but I like being able to see the structural elements peeking through.