I've been watching and reading this site, among others, since the summer when I decided that I wanted to try my hand at building a canoe. There's a ton of useful information here and love looking at people's pictures of their canoes in process/water.
My father and my son built a small 10' canoe over the summer (it's not quite finished yet, but it will hopefully be before mine is).
He had several plans for larger canoes and kayaks that he had purchased over the years, and after looking through all of them, I decided on the Prospector plans that he purchased here back in the 90's.
Anyway, before I bore you any further with all this, I'd like to get to my question. I started stripping the hull this past weekend and currently have 4 strips on each side. The strips are bent to follow the shearline of the boat. My original plan was to transition at this point to a more gentle curve (close to a straight line parallel to the waterline). I had a pattern in mind, but am not not sure how it will look.
This picture is a sketch sort of explaining what I was thinking...
The lighter strips were going to be maple (seeing that's what the stems and gunwale will be made from) and the rest of the canoe will be western red cedar.
I'm wondering how this is going to look now that I'm at the point of adding this "accent" strip".
I assume the decision to attach the planks along the shearline versus a more gradual bend, is the builders preference? Is there an advantage to one over the other?
I'm sort of at a point where I'm not sure if I should proceed with my original design intent, skip it and continue planking to the shearline curve, or starting over with the gradual curve.
Thanks for any advice you might be able to offer, and thanks for such a great resource.
Scott