My wife asked me a few days ago what I wanted to do for Father’s Day. I said, “Let’s put the canoe in the water”. It’s not 100% complete, but it’s darn close enough. I need to put more varnish on the seat hangers, and the gunwhales (especially the scuppers). I need to do the […]
Archives for Huron Cruiser
Seat Hangers
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 […]
Thwart
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 […]
Seat frames
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 […]
Varnishing
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 […]
Decks, again
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 […]
Gunwhale repair
Cut, chisel, cut, glue. Easy as that really. *UPDATE* Turns out I didn’t get a shot of the repair specifically beyond this stage. I went through other photos to find one later. You can see how it faired out in this shot below. I’m fooling around with […]
The Move
My time in the shop at work is over. The rest of the build will take place in my parents basement. I’ve been working like crazy through August to get the boat to this state where it’s strong enough to be transported. So today the boat, the strongback, the extra strips and all the […]
Gunwhales – Part 2
The second inwhale went on the same as the first. No surprises there. Even better than that, it lined up exactly the same. You can see at the bow and stern where I chose to end the gunwhales short of the stems and rounded them over. I decided I wanted to make the decks flush […]
Gunwhales – Part 1
After glassing the inside and getting the graphite finished the next step is gunwhales. The above photo is my first dry fit of the inwhale. There was lots of measuring and fitting here. In order to get the inwhale length perfect you need to have the center amidships spaced out to its desired final width […]