She Floats

Roscoe · Post by **Roscoe** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 5:13 pm

Yes . The Freedom 17 floats, even without varnish. After 7 months of labour a new canoe is born. She tipped the scales at 54lb and took her first dip on Friday evening 06/06/30.

Now I'm looking forward to the holidays. Camping, fishing, photos, exploring..........

Roscoe

jfranck · Post by **jfranck** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 8:16 pm

Looks great. I just finished mine too. See new message for details.

Rick · Post by **Rick** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 6:41 am

Beauty! Nice and light, too.... enjoy the summer!

Bryan Hansel · Post by **Bryan Hansel** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 5:43 pm

Looks great! I love my Freedom 17. It's such a great boat. You should get many miles of pleasurable tripping out of your new canoe.

mtpocket · Post by **mtpocket** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 5:51 pm

Nice job Roscoe.

How did you keep the weight down so low?

canoeblderinmt · Post by **canoeblderinmt** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 10:29 pm

Sweet canoe, Roscoe. Now I really want to build one, too! You did a nice job on selecting with wood and arranging it for color. I hope you enjoy it for many years to come.

Greg

Bassbug · Post by **Bassbug** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 5:31 pm

Very nice job! Makes we want to put this one on my ever growing build list.

Dale

Roscoe · Post by **Roscoe** » Thu Jul 06, 2006 6:24 pm

Thanks for the kind words and good wishes. You have read it all before on this forum, this really is a very good canoe. I don't have a lot of paddling experience and my partner has none but on Sunday morning on Lough Neagh for about five minutes everything clicked into place. It was a pure joy to paddle. Fast easy gliding. I'm hoping that with practice we can return to that state again and again. This evening I paddled the local river solo for two hours after reading how to do it on Bryan Hansels Nessmucking site. Great site Bryan...I just need a lot more practice.

The canoe is light because everything is a bit on the thin side and I haven't varnished it yet. I used 6 oz cloth but didn't fill the weave on the inside. I was unsure of the plank thickness as I didn't do a great job when bead and coving the strips so some ended up a bit staggered. 95% of the inside was done with cabinet scrapers. I was afraid of sanding through the hull. How many coats of epoxy? I don't know. I seemed to be sanding them of as quick as I was putting them on.

I didn't use any accent stripes or scuppered gunnels prefering to keep things as simple as possible and also to speed up the building. I was running low on strips so there are a few knots showing. Rembrant....more like Picasso. The strips were matched for colour as I went along and worked out ok.

Cost! When I first joined the forum I was going to build a cheap canoe using plywood strips/ bead and coved :shocked . Thankfully you managed to sway me away from that idea and I now have a fine looking canoe. I could probably have bought a good royalex canoe for the money spent on this one but i've really enjoyed the toil and the learning. I believe that with the experience gained while building I could build the same canoe better in half the time at half the cost and if we learn from our mistakes there isn't a d*****ed thing I don't know about canoe building

Once again I'd like to thank you all for your interest and input and a very big thanks to Glen Smith for his patience, help, advice and for running this site. Thanks to Ted for Canoecraft and Steve Killing for his lovely canoe plans.

Glen Smith · Post by **Glen Smith** » Thu Jul 06, 2006 6:44 pm

Roscoe, you did a really good job!

Those pictures make me want to build a Freedom too.

Snowman · Post by **Snowman** » Thu Jul 06, 2006 8:05 pm

Roscoe,

A fine job! I have Freedom-envy!

Snowman

David James · Post by **David James** » Thu Jul 06, 2006 8:40 pm

Hey Roscoe, nice looking craft, man!
My F17 will hopefully be on the water in another month or so...

good job!

Dave, in Glenview

Danny Turner · Post by **Danny Turner** » Sun Jul 16, 2006 6:15 pm

Great pics Francis. Hope to have mine in the water by end of July.But as you said ,probably be closer to early August. I don`t want to miss the summer and am trying to push things along now.I pussyfooted around too long.Hope to see you on the same water.
Danny