The Bear Mountain Boat Shop

I used 3 coats of a good quality 2 component polyurethane DD-coat on interior (clear coat) and exterior (coloured) which is commonly used in marine industry & yacht building. Advantage of this paint in comparisson to other paints is that it's relative hard and abrassion resistant. But in general...

Initially I planned to paint the interior of my woodstrip Osprey too, but after I saw a beautifull exterior painted Winisk on the Greenvalley homepage some time ago I became inspired and took the big step to actually paint the exterior in stead of the interior of my canoe. I know you're asking for t...

Hi all, Last weekend I test paddled my new Woodstrip Osprey Solo canoe which is finally finished after more than a year of building. I'll try to post some pictures soon. I installed a slider seat supported on top of a wooden slider bar and with 4 small stainless steel brackets to ensure seat is prop...

Update - Just to let you know how I solved this issue... with good success... I decided not to make new stems - but to use the twisted ones and take the risk. Fortunately the stems we made were pretty long, and extended approx 2" from the shearline strip. So I was able to twist the stems back t...

I would recommend to soak the wood in water for a night before steam bending.
My cherry stems were steamed for 20 minutes. Without the overnight soak in water it cracked - with one night soak it went just fine.

Michel, The Netherlands

I have no experience on this with staples but I would be concerned about corrosion of staples if left too long. If staples start to corrode they will leave rust stains in the wood around the staple holes which you can not remove. Perhaps you should consider stainless steel staples, or remove staples...

At this moment I'm stripping my new Osprey solo canoe, which has a total of 13 station. For this project I purchased 26x 2" C-clamps, 8x 3" C-clamps and 8x 4" C-clamps. We found that this was just the right ammount we needed. The larger C-clamps are used for clamping the stems to stem...

Check out the Green valley Boatworks building notes. There's a nice article about stapeless construction.

http://www.greenval.com/FAQnostaples.html

It works great!

Michel, The Netherlands

Hello there, I think I need some advise of the bear mounain pro's.... I finished the cherry inner and outer stems for my Osprey solo canoe... I use tapered stems. I steam bended the stem strips after a night of soaking in water. Dried the stems for 4 days on the stem mould and epoxied them together....

Hi all, Next weekend I plan to mount the stations of my Osprey solocanoe to the strongback. Drawings indicate that stations are to be bolted to the wooden support blocks. Canoe craft uses screws in stead to fix stations to the wooden support blocks. What are the pros and cons of both methods, and wh...

I just found out that Green Vally added many new building plans of existing "standard canoe designs" to their program... These plans now can be ordered on CD-ROM as dxf formatted CAD files. Check it out! Green Vally and John Winters also accept Custom Design Requests... http://www.greenval...

Hello Doug, We always use our spray deck when we paddle in hard wind, waves and rain. When we bought our used canoe, it came with a home made spraydeck. Although hard to install, metal snap fittings screwed under the outer gunwale, we like some things about the spraycover: 1) reduced wind resistance...

My Kevlar Mad River Malecite has "Native New England Butternut" wooden decks...
MRC used this because they don't use any tropical rain forest products... so they say.

Doug, I like to re-apply oil on my gunwales because my Kevlar canoe already had oiled gunwales. I need to re-oil, and like the looks and feel of the oiled trim very much. For my strip-canoe which I intend to build next spring I also plan to oil gunwales and trim. Because I like the looks of oiled wo...

I intend to do some re-oiling of my wooden gunwales, thwarts, yoke and decks. Temperature in my barn has dropped between 5-10 degrees Centigrade (=40-50 degrees Fahrenheit). Is it still possible to oil my gunwales and other woodworks at these temperature, or should I wait for next spring. I intend t...