The Bear Mountain Boat Shop

This is one of two issues. Moisture on or in the wood will cause this. If you wet sanded the bare wood, it really needed a long dry time especially in the shop conditions you describe. Those conditions are also the other issue. When the hull is cold or resin is cold it is thicker, stiffer than when ...

Instead of alternating wide and narrow you might use the wider strips on the flatter sides of the hull and save the narrow ones for going around the bilge. Whatever you do, make sure you match strip width on both sides. For years I got stock from a BC mill and it was planed to less than 3/4 inch. Mi...

If you have a set of full-sized plans you can create your own table of offsets.

The website doesn't list which designs have off-sets in the book. I rather doubt that the Freedom solo is in there. The plans are available and well worth the $95. No matter how good we might be at drafting from off-sets, working from full-sizes reproduced patterns is going to be more accurate. The ...

I would be more concerned about an incomplete cure going in the water and getting cloudy. Most boat epoxies take about a week to fully cure. I have always waited that period before finish sanding and varnishing. Exposure to water before a full cure may cause whitish cloudiness. Of course it may not!...

I suppose steaming is one solution. You will have to clamp the steamed strips in place until they cool and dry and then glue them. Steam boxes can be made of plywood or a length of PVC pipe. Electric tea pot is a typical steam generator. The other solution, and the best IMHO, is to let the strips ru...

OK. 3/16 is not real thin. Lots of folks have used them at that thickness. I have run bead and cove on 3/16 with out any issues. I was using real straight grained cedar at the time. That tool for making the bevel looks real cool. Wish I had that back in the 1980s!

How thin? What is the reason for "very thin strips"? The thinner the strips get the more flexible your composite will be given the same fiberglass lay-up. The separation of the inner and outer glass layers by the strips creates the stiffness in the hull. If you go too thin with the wood co...

I think the Venture would be a fine boat. Another excellent alternative and even shorter would be the John Winters design Tasman Sea. Steve Killing(Venture) and John Winters(Tasman Sea) have very similar ideas for small craft design and very very good ones, too.

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

Of course, my first comment would be WHY??? Its not a simple bevel, but will change over the length of the strip. My first three canoes were hand planed bevels back in the early 1980s before I discovered the bead and cove methods. I could do maybe three strips each side in a day. With B&C and ca...

https://www.wooden-canoes.com/canoes/materials/hardware/ The source for SB 3/16 x 4 carriage bolts. The SS machine screws are listed as #10-24 rather than 3/16. If you look hard you might find Philips head, but all I found were slotted. Most marine supply places carry them. You can get 1/4 brass or ...

Yeah, well, we all want long small diameter brass or bronze bolts, but we are a tiny market and nobody else seems to want them. Sooo..... I never used longer than 4 inch silicon bronze carriage bolts in 3/16. They are still available, but costly. I always felt comfortable with seats that high. For t...

If your cloth puckers along the edges it is sometimes helpful to cut off the selvedge, the finished edge of the cloth. That releases the fibers to adjust to a contour a little better. I like to leave the selvedge on if I can, because its neat, but I don't hesitate to remove it if it will let the clo...

No glass on the inside is a bad idea. Any impact from the outside is absorbed by the inside glass. I would consider using lighter glass on both inside and out. A lot of weight is resin to fill the weave of the glass. Look at the thickness of various glass fabrics. Your 4 ounce glass is real thick, i...

Control sweat! Wear absorbent clothing with long sleeves. Maybe a wrist band and head band to prevent sweat dripping on to the uncured resin or the glass before resin is applied. Sweat will make a milky blotch.