15' 0" Freedom

[Joan and Ted]

Use this forum to post information specific to your 15' 0" Freedom project. Use POST REPLY when posting information. Please stay on topic. For general boatbuilding discussions, please use the Builders Forum instead.

[Shea]

hello,
i am going to be building a freedom 15 canoe. any tips?

[jhaab]

I have had plans for the 15' Freedom Canoe for about a year now and will be starting the building process soon. Look forward to chatting with other Freedom builders.

[sluggo]

I've started the build for a Freedom 15. It may still be a few weeks before I start stripping, but you can follow my progress on my blog:
http://www.dryfly.ca/blog/2007/03/03/bu ... canoe.html

and gallery:
http://www.dryfly.ca/gallery2/v/canoe/

I guess that any particularly interesting photos or bits of information will also get posted in the builders forum.

cheers
Doug

[sluggo]

I've made a fair bit of progress so far (for me and my busy life!). There aren't a lot of things to see yet. I've cut some strips for the stems, along with ripping some strips for a yost SeaRider SOF kayak. It was good practice for ripping wood and setting up my board buddies. I've also finished the forms, built my box beam, and finished half of steaming the stems.

[Glen Smith]

Progress is progress! At least you are into building mode, keep us posted.

[Patricks Dad]

Sluggo,
I'm a few days behind you building the same boat. .

Did you have any problems bending your stems? While it's only ~90 degrees of bend, its pretty much all in one place (my prior experience was building a Redbird which has lots of curve but it's fairly evenly distributed - larger radius).

I should be bending my stems tomorrow morning.


Thanks

[sluggo]

The bending was incredibly easy. I just clamped one end of the stems on the mold and then pulled the strips down and put another clamp on the other end. Then I added more clamps to avoid recoil. One wrc inside stem cracked a little bit, but I think there was a knot there. Or maybe I just bent it too fast. Either way it won't be a problem once I add the epoxy.

http://www.dryfly.ca/blog/category/freedom-15/

Are you building yours as a 15'? I think mine will be 16', Steve Kiling recommended this to me for my purposes (2 young kids). He said the 16' would be fine. I've read that the last station before the stems may need some fairing to make sure the strips are fair to the stems since the station spacing is changed a bit. I'll put a few test strips on the station molds and see how it looks. Hopefully I won't need to make any adjustments.

[Patricks Dad]

Sluggo,
Thanks. I'm building it 15' per the plan. The last canoe I built was a Redbird shrunk by 6" to 17'. That was only 1/2 inch shrink on each station (which I had to correct earlier this week to go back to standard 12" spacing).

I expect that this canoe will be used mostly 2 people or solo with no gear (just knocking around a lake).

[sluggo]

I finished ripping all of my strips this past weekend. I think I did about 140 full length strips. Hopefully it will all work out okay with not too much effort, as opposed to purchasing perfectly machined strips. Several of my strips have weathered faces and I hope I'm able to sand the strips down to a nice uniform finish once the hull is stripped. I also hope that my cutting resulted in really even strips. I can only imagine the pain that would be caused if the strip thickness varies quite a bit. I'll have to keep a sharp eye out and not be afraid to cut strips into pieces if it results in me removing thinner sections of strips. Thicker sections can always be sanded down quite easily imo.
Check out the picture and link below to my building blog. I noticed that my server is slow today, hopefully it won't be when interested people go to check it out!



Freedom 15 blog

Freedom 15 photo album with descriptions

[Patricks Dad]

Wow, 140 strips sounds like about 2X your need. You should have plenty!

I'm ready to put on my first strip (got stems shaped last night - partially at least). I need to hurry as my wife keeps coming up with more complex ideas for accents. :frightened

[sluggo]

At least your wife is offering ideas on canoes. After I finished ripping strips I had to cut some fir that will eventually become a fireplace mantel!

I also have plans to build a wood strip baidarka (Shooting Star from Laughing Loon), so I cut all the wood at once. I bought the wood from a guy that sold the whole lot for $120. On the other hand, I saw a really nice 2x8x16' at a lumber yard last week. The price was $2.30 per foot, which is another smoking deal I think. I'm tempted to get it too!. But it's easier just to buy some shorter lengths now, and might as well start with 1x flat grain. Then I wouldn't need to do fancy cutting or set up the infeed and outfeed tables.

[sluggo]

The Freedom is coming, slowly but surely.
Since my last post I've made the strongback and assembled all of the stations, tapered 1/2 of the stems and even put on a few strips.

For the strongback I originally had my boxbeam sitting on some stands. However, I didn't like how that was working out, so I re-assembled the boxbeam and put together some legs as outlined in canoecraft. I think that is the best way to go. Final strongback
With proper levelling and straightening of the strongback, putting on the moulds and aligning them was really easy.

For shaping the steps I would remove most of the wood with my spokeshave and then sand the stem to shape using John Michne's sanding stick method: Shaping Stems. I made one modification to his method. I did not staple temporary strips, instead I used strips to mark locations up along the mould and stem as shown below.


I decided to staple the first strip along the shear. Since the shear line is pretty straight, I decided to have the strips follow the shear the whole way. I think it will look okay. Perhaps I will add one more strip per side (4 on each side) and then use some walnut and AYC for some decorative strips. So far I am going the "stapless" route, although to be honest i don't have any qualms about using staples. I just thought i'd try the hot glue method and I have to say that so far it is working very well. 10 mini spring clamps and a hot glue gun are all you need! You hot glue your strip to the form and then clamp it. By the time you need more clamps, you can remove the first clamp because the hot glue will have set. The nice thing about this is that within minutes of attaching a strip you can add the next one. Building with staples would be faster though, and I've yet to experience how it will go when scraping off the hot glue.

[Patricks Dad]

I finished stripping my Freedom-15 about 3 weeks ago (summer activities are going to slow me down quite a bit now). I used the stapleless approach described in canoecraft. I did use hot glue to ensure that the strips were kept against the forms. This required a drop of glue every few strips. Used less than 1 glue stick for the whole job so I shouldn't have too much scraping to do. Overall, it worked very well (but certanily not as fast as gluing every strip.

[sluggo]

I haven't made much progress recently. Actually, I hardly did anything for a few months. However, I'm now 1/2 done my accent strip. I originally glued a thin AYC pinstrip then I was going to glue a walnut strip then another AYC. It quickly occurred to me that this was not the way to go. So now I'm finishing it by first gluing all of the AYC pinstrips to the walnut first. I've had to use short sections of walnut because the original board length was 7', but there was a major bend/kick in the wood at around 5'. So I'm planking each side using pieces that are 5' and 2' long. I'm just using butt joints.



In the meantime I also manged to finish my kayak cradles and I'm almost done an Aleut kayak paddle.[/img]