Not going to be a proper build thread, but since I have taken my efforts at a tandem tripper pretty well as far as my unheated garage will let me, I thought I would share a few things about it.
The canoe is a Freedom 17’9” from Bear Mountain, shortened to about 17’4” to give me a little more maneuvering room to build in my garage.
I am more concerned with durability than weight, but still want to keep the weight down where it can safely be done on a boat this size. I used 3/16 strips above the waterline and 1/4 inch below to head-off possible oil-canning. The design calls for stems, but I opted to go without them for a little bit of weight savings and to reduce complexity.
The strips are a mix of Western Red and Eastern White cedar, a few 12 and 16 foot lengths but most are 8 feet or less, so lots of butt joints, and no fancy strip pattern. I will be painting the exterior hull and leaving the interior clear. First time cutting and using bead and cove - extra prep work for sure, but well worth it once I got to finally put things together.
I didn’t take any photos of the form set-up etc., or first bunch of strips - nothing different than for other builds. As is visible in some of the photos below, I had to add a foot-long “shelf” on each end of my strong back to accommodate the extra length (the strong back was originally built to adjust for builds from 13 to 16 feet, as at the time I couldn’t see any reason why I would ever want to build something longer than that).
Started strips at the centre sheer line, letting the first strip find its own positioning towards the ends, and went from there. The transition from 3/16 to 1/4 inch strips was done without drama at the waterline on the middle forms, and since the waterline is not parallel with the sheer the first couple of 1/4 inch strips wound up above the waterline as they moved away from the centre. I used a cold tolerant glue (Lepage express) as most of the time I was putting this together the temperature was below 10 Celsius.
Once I got past the stems I kind of accidentally cut the first of the flat-laying strips to fit a herringbone bottom pattern, and decided to just go with it. I did the centreline overlap and cut thing on my last build and didn’t find it that bad, but was happy to try something different. As I got closer to finishing off the football I was getting a little worried about whether there is a special way to close up a herringbone pattern. After many fruitless internet searches I decided to just keep going and deal with it when I got there, and wound up with an easily filled, single-wide whiskey strip gap.
After about a half hour of fussing with a plane and the sanding strip to get the end bevels right, it went in surprisingly easily.
After the staples were pulled I moved to roughing out the stems with my trusty Japanese saw and (gasp) belt sander.
Did a rough sanding with 60 grit today and here she sits until things warm up in a few months - hope to get a mild day or two so I can fill any gaps and dings with thickened epoxy before final sanding with something like 120 grit. But any further real work will have to wait until April probably.
My layup plan is 6 ounce S glass on the outside, with a 4 ounce S glass football. I have enough 6 ounce S glass for the interior as well, but thinking that might be overkill and may go with E glass instead. Unfortunately, I have lots of time to think about all the permutations and combinations that are possible.
But I’ll still keep busy in my toasty warm basement. I bought a bunch of carbon and fibreglass sleeve and will be trying to develop my mediocre skills to experiment on carbon over foam or cedar gunnels, thwarts and maybe seat frames for this canoe to see what I can reasonably pull-off to keep weight down, while maintaining a strong boat.
Thanks all, and stay safe
Tony