Playing With Boats

The canoe in the Canadian Canoe Museum’s Living Traditions Workshop, where I’ll finish it off in time for the raffle drawing on October 15th.

Beginning to install the deck framing. We didn’t have any nice spruce around, but did have some white oak, so we wentwith that. The centre carlin butts up against the aft face of the stem at each end.

I made a little stop for the carlin to sit on to simplify fastening it to the stem.

The centre carlin in place at the stem.

The side carlins, which support the and the side decks and the cockpit coaming, die into the centre carlin just aft of the bow. This means a beveled end, which I’ve scribed off the boat and cut on the bench.

One of the side carlins in place, notched through the watertight bulkhead.

The carlins are screwed down into the bulkheads.

They are also fastened into the deck supports of the midships frame. Because the screw is going in cross-grain, it’s a good idea to clamp the deck support before drilling, and make sure that the drill is going in dead straight.

The side and centre carlins fitted and fastened.

The covering boards, or side decks, butt together near the middle of the canoe, so we’ve made a little oak butt block to go underneath that joint and fastened it in place through the carlin.

The butt block is also fastened in through the sheer plank.

With all of the deck framing in place, we can clamp on some deck stock and begin to take off the shape. The museum has lots of cherry left over from paddle-carving classes, so we’ll give this Fiddlehead an upgrade to cherry decks, coamings and rub rails. Because we’ll be building this boat again, I’m using some leftover cedar planking to make patterns first before I cut the cherry.

The edges of the carlins are traced on to the bottom of the pattern stock and it is bandsawed to approximate shape, as always leaving the line.

Once it is cut out, the pattern is placed back on the boat and trimmed to final shape. I also took the precaution of trying it on the other three quarters of the canoe as well to make sure there wasn’t too much variation in the finished size.

The carlins make good guides for trimming the inside edge of the pattern to final shape.

The covering board pattern trimmed to final size and taped in place.

On this canoe, the deck laps over the covering board, so another piece of pattern stock is put in place to trace off the shape of the deck.

I wanted to get the fit between the deck pattern and the coaming just right, so I mocked up the bent coaming from a scrap piece of planking.

The patterns for the covering board and the centre deck in place.

Since this boat is the same at each end [and, depending how well it’s built, the same on each side!], one pattern for each piece of deck should suffice. It’s wise to leave a generous margin when first cutting them out, though.

With the patterns in hand, it’s much easier to make efficient use of your stock and make sure you avoid knots and other irregularities. Here I’m tracing the first pattern on the cherry stock, which has already been planed to its finished thickness of 3/16”.

Until next time. . .