Sample deck/gunwale joint?

[garypete]

I'm building a 16' 4" canoe and have only 16' spruce stock for the gunwales. Rather than splicing the spruce stock for full-length gunwales, I'd prefer to use the 16' stock for inner gunwales and make up the rest of the inwale length with the decks.

Anyone have a creative joint system for joining gunwales into deck plates? I've seen the standard system Gil Gilpatrick uses of just relieving the decks a couple inches for the 3/4" x 3/4" gunwales then epoxying the ends of the gunwales into the reliefs of the decks. There there must be better ways to join too-short gunwales into long decks. Any suggestions?

Gary

[Patricks Dad]

This may be a useless response but depending on how much (if any) recurve your canoe design has, the gunwales may be quite a bit shorter than the canoe length. For example, the Redbird is designed to be 17'6" but the inwales are about 16'6" (about a foot shorter). How short are your inwales? It hadn't occured to me that I could get away with much shorter inwales and bought 18' stock. Once we went to fit them, it became apparent that we had overlooked the recurve and we had lots of extra wood.

Assuming no recurve, your inwales must be less than 4" short (2" minus the depth of your stems on each end). If your stems are 3/4" thick (and you have an inner and outer stems), you would appear to be only about 1/2" short on each end.

You might consider running your inwales as far as they will go and compensating for the difference in the deck. Assuming the inwales are tapered, the "jog" in the deck might actually look pretty cool.

[garypete]

Randy,
It's a Prospector with little stem recurve, so I would need inner gunwale stock of 16' 6".

[patrick]

you could do what Glen Smith did when he had shorter inwales than the length that he needed. There is a good picture under the "stripe in deck pattern" on the 2nd page.

[Glen Smith]

You can see in this photo that I just cut a notch in the deck to allow the too short inwales to end gracefully. This was not planned but rather my way of making the best of a bad situation after breaking the tip of one inwale during the bending operation.

[Tom in MN]

Trust Mr. Gilpatrick, he has built more canoes than all of us put together plus some. If you use a flush deck, that is about the only way to do it in my opinion. You could scarf on a piece on each end of your gunnel stock, then use a cap deck and this would cover the scarf on the inwale and make it invisible.

Why don't you scarf your gunnels and make them the length you want. I do this all the time and it works fine. Every canoe that I have has scarfed gunnels mainly because I refuse to pay the premium price lumberyards want for long lumber. Plan your scarf so your yoke straddles it if you are worried about strength, but it is not an issue because it is laminated with the hull and outwale. Just stagger your joints if you also scarf your outwales.