Friday, May 29, 2009

Making a 16 ft piece of plywood and layout


The first thing I did was to rip the 4x8 sheets of 4mm marine plywood into (4) 2x8 sheets. I then scarfed the ends with 1:10 bevels with a handplane then epoxied them together with thickened (colloidal silica) epoxy. My bevels were not perfect and the joint is less than great on one piece.

The next step is to layout the strips. My boat has 10 strips: 5 mirror image pairs. The plans I have listed points every foot to define the curve of the strips. Basically, I needed to plot points on the plywood. First I stacked and clamped the two large pieces of plywood on top of each other. I then "plotted" the points from the plans with small wire nails. After marking and driving about 140 nails, I then moved on to lofting.
I then used the nails as little clamping posts to hold a 16 foot piece of window molding to the nails and drew a nice, fair line the length of the planks. Once all the planks are marked, it was time to start cutting.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

How do I build a 14 foot canoe in a 15 foot garage?


The answer is I don't. The first thing I did was build a table to build the boat on. I needed at least a 14 foot table that was reasonably flat. It seemed like the best thing to do was to build it on wheels so that I could wheel it out in the driveway and wheel it back when I am done. My Model T sized garage just won't fit bikes, lawnmowers, etc and accommodate building a boat so this seemed like the best choice. Here are a couple of images of the table. The bottom shelf holds all the planks as I go

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Why?

Well, I had a wonderful Blackhawk Fishhawk (maybe Nighthawk) canoe years ago and seriously regret selling it. I looked for a used one or similar boat and no luck (at least at a price I wanted) . I decided to build and couldn't find a strip plan I liked. I ran across a guy in the Twin Cities (Eskimo Tom who will develop a plan for you to your specs......perfect.

http://www.finewoodwatercraft.com/ET_stitchandglue_home.html

He put together exactly what I wanted...solo, 26" beam and 14 ft long with a touch of rocker and tumblehome. I wanted to build a boat for a while so it was time.

I decided to do a blog on the construction because I found very little information on the web about building a plywood stitch and glue boat on the web. There are some guides and books out there. For this reason, I am not posting about the general method of building a plywood boat but I do want to log what I do and record the little tricks I am learning......along with my mistakes so people don't repeat them!