Today was fun with hardwood. I have a small pile of dogwood I cut up a couple years ago before I even decided to build the canoe. I need some hard wood for the outer stems so I’m having a go with the dogwood. The outer stems need to be tough as they take a […]
Archives for Huron Cruiser
Station Molds 2
A couple of solid sessions in the shop and the station molds are all cut out and faired now. I’ll be so happy to finish working with plywood. It’s convenient and flat and dimensionally stable but it sure is awful to shape and cut nicely. I’ve had a lot of birch splinters in the last […]
Cherry for trim
I threw a pin cherry log on the mill today. I’m hoping to get the gunwhales and thwarts out of this if it isn’t too badly checked. The log was cut almost two years ago but it has been up off the ground. The ends were very checked but after cutting off as much as […]
Paper to Plywood
Today I made the stem molds. This was the first time I’ve gotten to turn points on paper into a three dimensional object made of wood. The plans that I’d lofted earlier get taped to a scrap board (to save the workbench from holes and cuts). A tiny finishing nail is driven through each point […]
Lofting
Canoe building this week has taken place on our kitchen table with the drafting supplies. I’m using the table of offsets in Canoecraft to make the plans for the station molds. Not super thrilling work, but it is exciting seeing the shapes of the canoe coming out on the paper. Plotting the points requires a […]
Planing the planks
Good weather has finally struck for a few days in a row. I’ve moved the thickness planer into the covered bay outside and set up some sawhorses with the plywood from the strongback as the infeed and outfeed tables. I took two afternoons to slowly bring all my planks to a uniform thickness. It’s […]
Back to work – Starting the Strongback
After giving the planks 8 months to dry out, they’re ready to get machined into strips. To do that the planks have to go through the thickness planer, the table saw, and a router table. Each of those operations requires an infeed and outfeed of about 18′ each. So the doors for the shop need […]
Storage Rack
Storage for the strips once they’re milled. I spent a couple of hours making up the first of the storage racks that I’ll use to store the cedar strips once they’re made. The rack above is a metre across and I’ll have two more just like it. The three racks evenly spaced should support the […]
Milling the cedar planks
This is the log that will become my canoe. The first step in building the canoe is turning a cedar log into planks. The final strips will be 1 inch high by 3/16″ thick. Those strips will be ripped out of planks 1″ thick which will be cut out of the log on the […]
The Inception of the Canoe Project
Since I was a teenager I’ve wanted to build a cedar strip canoe. When I was in boy scouts one of my Scoutmasters had built one and it was by far the nicest canoe I’d seen. In my twenties I bought a copy of Ted Moore’s Canoecraft and read it through and through many times. […]