The flip

I just checked and my last canoe post was at the beginning of November. I really didn't do much between American Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was kind of a busy time with work and getting ready to go back to Ontario for the holidays. Oh yeah, and I was making my Mom a warping board for her weaving, which took up a couple weekends.

But there is some progress on the canoe to report. After the first layer of fibreglass I added two extra strips of cloth over the bow and stern stems for a little added durability. These blended in fairly well and shouldn't be noticeable once all of the varnish is on. Then I applied two more coats of epoxy - squeegeeing on the first and brushing on the last. Afterwards I waited a couple weeks for it to fully cure and then scraped off all of the drips with a cabinet scraper. As most first-time builders do I think I put on the epoxy too thickly. Oh well, it is better than not putting on enough. It just means more work at this stage with scraping and sanding. I didn't do much else till Tracy and I returned from the holidays at the start of January. The first weekend back I was eager to get to work again and I got through the grueling task of sanding the epoxy smooth. It was grueling mostly because I put on too much epoxy and it was quite uneven in places. With the power sander starting with 80 grit and moving to 120 grit after one pass I leveled and smoothed the surface of the epoxy. This is supposed to be important in achieving a flawless uniform glossy finish at the end. I spent about 6 hours without break sanding. The dust gets everywhere and I didn't feel like cleaning up to eat until it was done. I spent three to four hours the next day cleaning up the mess from all the dust. During sanding I would pause every once in a while to vaccuum off the canoe. I found that a fibreglass canoe and a plastic vaccumm make an excellent static electricity generator! ouch. All in all it turned out pretty well. I sanded down a little too far only a couple places on the edges of the added bow and stern strips. Otherwise, I didn't damage any fibreglass and the weave is mostly invisible.

This weekend I undertook the much more enjoyable task of flipping the canoe over to an upright position. Saturday I cobbled together three padded cradles in the shape of the two #5 stations near the ends and the #0 station in the middle. Then today I enlisted Tracy again to help with the flip. I had to chisel off some extra epoxy that had dripped down to form little puddles around the bow and stern stems in order to separate the canoe from the strongback. The ends of the stems will be cut off eventually anyways so it didn't damage the canoe. I was a little worried that I would have trouble lifting the canoe off of the station molds so I just unscrewed all of the station molds from the strongback first. This seemed to be a great idea until Tracy and I lifted the canoe up and flipped it over. At this point all of the heavy plywood station molds tipped over into the canoe. I was worried that the hull was going to crack, but it just bent a little and held strong. A couple of the tipping molds did leave little dents in the cedar strips on the inside though. D'oh. I think they will mostly sand out.

It was an amazing day here today. Its January and it was about 75deg F (25deg C) and sunny. Perfect for setting the shell out on the strip of grass in front of the house for a photo before returning it to the garage to finish.

The Traditional Thanksgiving Road Trip

We seem to have begun a traditon of turkey day road tripping. As we don't own a roasting pan and our families are far away (VERY far away at the moment) it's a good opportunity for a mini-vacation. This year we went to San Diego.

A bizarre scene at the Hotel Del Coronado.

Yep, November in California is rough.

The aviaries at the San Diego Zoo are really great.






Polar Bear Plunge!

Guess this warthog ate too much turkey.

Botanical Garden in Balboa Park.

After a 9-hour drive on Thursday including a hellish slog through LA, we got to San Diego in time to stroll through Balboa Park as the sun went down. After that we went in search of a Thanksgiving feast. Unfortunately "Little Italy" was officially closed so we headed downtown. We found a nice hotel restaurant that was open and had waldorf salad, squash soup, salmon, and pecan pie. Mmmmm.

On Friday after a run in the park, we met our friend Rich at the Zoo. The place is so huge, I don't know how you could see everything in one day! We did our best not to get run down by a zoo-mobile. I knew the visit was complete once I'd spent $0.50 to destroy a penny in the name of the ultimate cheesy souvenir. I think I already lost it.

After the zoo we drove over to Coronado Island to check out the Hotel Del (I can call it that since I've been to San Diego once or twice before in the company of a local.). Then we tried Little Italy again and this time the neighborhood was officially open. We had pizza and beer at Filippi's Pizza Grotto. The line was down the block! But we waited for the chance to dine under hundreds of chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling. Guess you don't see THAT just anywhere.

For our last day we decided to take in some history. We saw the official start of the El Camino Real which runs right past our house all the way up here. It starts where Padre Junipero Serra founded the Mission of San Diego de Alcala in San Diego. Not that thrilling. Also hit Cabrillo National Monument at Point Loma and Old Town San Diego. There are some museums there with quite a lot of interesting objects and information if you can get past the cheesy junk shops and hordes of people. We did a little frontier-style gambling, talked to a coffin-maker, and sent morse-code messages at the Wells Fargo museum. FUN! We topped it off with a visit to the Karl Strauss brewery and the new James Bond movie downtown.

Hoping to avoid a traffic debacle on the way home, we took an alternate route that looped around Edwards Air Force Base (check your google map) and were close to seeing the Space Shuttle landing there, but the timing wasn't quite right. A mere 9 hours later we were home!

I'm thankful that you're still reading, but this is the end.

Fibreglass

Ever since I started building the canoe in my half of the garage, dust, cobwebs, termite droppings and debris have been falling from the ceiling onto it. Up until now it hasn't been a problem because I just wipe it away and continue on, but for the fibreglass and epoxy step debris falling from the ceiling won't do. So I spent most of the day Saturday cleaning out the garage literally from top to bottom. I don't think it's ever been cleaned since it was built in the 1930's. I took the shop vac to the ceiling, framing and roof joists and just about everything else above canoe level. Afterward I was still worried about stuff falling from above so I tacked plastic sheeting to the beams above the canoe.

On Sunday, I got all my supplies ready - resin and hardener, paint brushes, plastic squeegee, mixing pots, disposable gloves, mixing containers, face masks, etc. and recruited Tracy to be my Chief Mixer. The 6 oz. fibreglass sheet was unrolled directly on to the canoe. It is actually quite delicate and any pulling, tugging or touching can quickly deform the natural weave of the fibres. We carefully laid it out and there didn't seem to be any major creases, which made me happy. With Tracy mixing the resin and hardener for me and cleaning my brushes and containers all I had to worry about was getting the resin onto the boat - just enough for the 'glass and wood to soak it up without drying out, but not too much that it pooled and dripped. Tracy also kept track of timing and where I was on the hull so that I could return to a previously applied area after 30 minutes to squeegee off the excess epoxy. I certainly couldn't have done this alone. At first we were working on a 20 minute interval as recommended by the book and I was finding it hard to keep up with the schedule, barely finishing applying the resin to one section before having to go back to squeegee a previous. Since the weather was fairly cool though, the epoxy was not curing very quickly and I found after the first couple sections that 30 minutes worked out better.

All in all the process went fairly well. There are no major bubbles, dry spots, cracks or runs in the 'glass. There are quite a few drips that formed even after I squeegeed that I will have to sand off before the next coat, but that is probably the worst of it. Before I put on the next two coats I think I will apply a couple extra strips of fibreglass fabric to the bow and stern for extra strength and durability in those locations.

Oh yeah, and I chose a name for the canoe. You can see it (upside down for now) in a couple of the pictures.

raising the grain

I have just finished with most of the sanding on the outside of the hull. After planing down the edges of the strips I power-sanded with 80-grit paper on the random orbit sander. There is a bag to collect the dust, but it only catches about half of it. The rest ends up covering me and just about everything else in the garage. At least the plastic sheeting kept most of it off our neighbour's stuff. After sanding I could still see several gaps between the strips and I decided that I better fill them in with epoxy and cedar dust. Otherwise I could get air bubles under the fibreglass, which would be a disaster. So then I ended up sanding with the custom-made sanding blocks I put together (two blocks of plywood clamping together the edges of a sheet of sandpaper and tightened with a bolt and wingnut) and more power-sanding. Leaving on extra epoxy could cause the finish to look splotchy after I am done glassing so I had to balance getting off all of the extra epoxy and sanding the wood down too much.

Finally, after all of this I was able to wet-out the hull with a water-dampened cloth to raise the grain for final sanding. Wow, it has a great colour and the grain looks amazing! And the wet cedar smelled terrific. If I actually wore cologne I would want it to smell like that. Too bad the boat won't smell that way after it is encased in fibreglass and epoxy!

From boards to a boat

I've been working on building this canoe for almost 10 months and up until now I feel like I have just been putting the pieces together in the shape of a boat. In the last two weekends though I have started to turn the collection of wood strips into a real craft with flowing lines that will actually someday grace the water. Last weekend I shaped the rough-cut outer stems into the aerodynamic leading and trailing edges of the canoe. It was some of the hardest work so far as it was a lot harder to use the spokeshave on the cherry hardwood than it was for the softer cypress and I had to be careful as I blended the stems into the hull not to damage to the edges of the cedar strips. Then, this weekend I completed the tedious, but gratifying task of pulling all of the staples - about 700 of them. I was just slightly worried that this step would result in the boat springing apart, but that did not happen. With that done I pulled out the block plane and shaved off all of the rough corners on the canoe where the edges of each strip come together with it's neighbours. It left a mountain of cedar shavings on the floor. While the hull is still rough it looks better already with the rounded edges. Next step will be to fill in the narrow gaps between some of the strips with colour-matched epoxy. The strips come together pretty tightly over much of the hull but there are some fair-sized gaps that need to be filled where the strips turn around the bilge amidship. I tested out the random orbit sander with 80-grit paper on the first two stations on one side to collect some cedar dust to mix with the epoxy.

Exterior Stems

Finally done with the strips, I have been fitting the exterior stems over the past couple weekends. I had steam bent these pieces out of cherry at the same time as the inner stems back in March or so and they've been waiting for me since then.
First task was to cut the stems rougly to length, then taper the keel-side end slightly so that it would not be wider than the inner stem as I cut away the cedar strips to allow it to fit. Next I cut a mortice into the hull starting roughly at the point where the stems turn sharply toward the bottom of the hull and ending about an inch shy of the end of the inner stem. Going too far would result in a hole through the hull! I used a 1/8" chisel, a sharp utility knife and a narrow sanding stick for this job and constantly dry-fit the stem to make sure it fit as perfectly as possible. The tedium paid off with a pretty good fit on both ends of the hull.
Next task was to epoxy the stems on. Canoecraft recommends using no.6 screws to firmly secure the outer stems while the epoxy dries and then to remove them and fill the holes with plugs. I wasn't confident in my ability to do this skillfully and I have read about other people simply strapping the stems down instead of using screws. This has the benefit of not having to remove the screws and plug the holes. I picked up some heavy duty rubber straps from OSH and tried a dry run. The straps seemed to work pretty well holding the stems in place securely so I decided to go for it. I am slightly concerned that the straps might be too tight and squeeze out too much epoxy, but after the fact I don't think that is the case. I covered the hull with painters tape and plastic too prevent most of the epoxy from getting on the hull. Then I brushed a few layers of unthickened epoxy on the stem ends to allow them to soak it up while I mixed up another batch of epoxy thickened with microfibres to the "consistency of peanut butter". This was painted on one of the mating surfaces and the stem was strapped down. I'll have to wait till tomorrow to see how well it has worked out...

Touchdown!

The long weekend was spent finishing off all of the stripping and "closing the football" on the bottom of the boat. To fit in the last piece I planed the cove edge off of the penultimate strip and planed and sanded the final 3-piece strip down to fit into the remaining slot (after a lot of measuring and marking). Tracy was there to take a couple photos as we fit in this final piece. It fit like a glove (with a couple short fingers). I imagine this is what hammering in the last spike on the trans-Canada railroad must have felt like! I am pretty pleased with the way things look.

Actually, I am far from done. The book Canoecraft says at this stage I am only about 1/3 of the way! It seems like it must be more than that. I think maybe they don't include building the strongback. Hopefully. Still, I can't believe I've made it this far. The most common question I get from the neighbourhood stoppers-by these days is "Looks good, how long have you been working on that, when is it going to be done??" My new estimate is "some time in the Spring". It sure feels good to reach this mile stone though.