Doubly Thwarted

I installed Miss Nancy’s thwart yesterday.

Thwarted!

It did not go as smoothly as I would have wished, and thus, the title of today’s post.

When we reglassed her hull last summer (!) she was not on a mold. A canoe mold (for this type of canoe) is a series of plywood cross sections mounted to a T-beam made from 2×10 lumber. I do not have a mold for Miss Nancy though, so when I was ready to put the glass on, I just propped her up on a pair of sawhorses and went at it. Unfortunately, the weight of the glass & epoxy on the unsupported hull caused her gunwales to turn inwards, giving her an exaggerated “tumblehome” (meaning, her widest point is not from gunwale to gunwale, but rather, it is below that point – the gunwales come in towards the center). A little tumblehome is good, because you can heel the canoe over pretty far before the gunwales dip below the surface, at which point the river/lake rushes in, and the canoe capsizes in seconds. The downside to tumblehome is that the gunwales are not as good at turning the waves away. They just come in over the gunwales. I would rather take on water that way than by the other way, but this was just way too much tumblehome.

I decided to address this by cutting the thwart a bit wider than her “resting” position suggests, so before I cut it, I placed a spreader clamp between the gunwales and carefully started cranking on it. Crank, crank, crank. OK, one more. Pop! I split her stern deck:

Stern deck… oops

Though disheartening, this too is fixable. Since the deck is already split, I might was well keep the gunwales spread apart as I intended. I plan to make a maple wedge whose width equals the width of the crack, and which tapers to a point. Then slather it with epoxy and insert it into the crack. I just need to be sure that the wedge is slightly higher than the rest of the deck so I can sand that down until it is at the same level. I do not wish to have to plane down the whole deck, which is a mistake I made on her bow.

When I put the bow deck in place, the starboard side just would not stay in position. It wanted to slip above the level of the gunwale. I even had a board clamped over it to stop that, and though somewhat effective, it was insufficiently effective. To fix that, I started planing the deck down to match the gunwales. Unfortunately (there’s that word again!) I ended up reducing the thickness of the deck by more than the thickness of the inlay.

Bow deck problem

So I’ll need to redo the starboard side of the inlay. I guess I’ll route it out (by hand) and cut a new piece of zebra wood to match, glue it in, clamp it down, and wait for the epoxy to set. Then I can sand the zebrawood inlay to match the level of the deck. I will do the expoxy work on both decks on the same day, because neither one of those jobs will require a full shot of epoxy, and that stuff is expensive. Like $130 per gallon. I guess it’s not that expensive – a shot of epoxy is about one fluid ounce, so that’s a whole dollar. But combined, the two deck repairs should use most of one shot. Why waste it?

Repairing my mistakes is not work that I enjoy so much, and because of that, I will have difficulty mustering the requisite ambition to actually do it! Especially when it’s hot & humid outside. But I will.

Other than the deck repair, all she needs is to have her seats mounted.

She’s so close!

 

Varnishing Miss Nancy

I slept in a little bit this morning, but these days, that means “past seven.” Va made breakfast, and then Beth asked me if I wanted to go for a walk somewhere. I asked “Where to?” and she answered “How about the Union Church?”

That sounded pretty OK to me, so off we went.

Northfield Union Church

It’s just under a mile from our house to this church which is owned by the town of Northfield. It was built back in the late 1800’s for the use of any denomination that wanted to use it, and they could use it free of charge. I don’t know if that’s the way it is still, but if it is, no denomination apparently wants to use it.

Penny was pretty thirsty when we started back again, so we detoured to Sandogardy Pond. She went in to cool off and get a drink, and then the three of us walked home again. By then it was nearly 10:00, so I drove to Tilton to visit the hardware store. I needed to get some new handles for my wheelbarrow, as mine broke neatly in half last week when I tried to move some rocks with it. Bill didn’t have any on hand, but he ordered some for me, and I will get them next week. No hurry there.

When I got home from the hardware store, I dug up the spar varnish I bought for the canoe project(s). Miss Nancy was ready for her first coat, so I laid some down on her gunwales.

Then it was time for Beth and me to head over to Laconia, as the Pathfinders had been hired to sweep our sister church’s parking lot (we share our pastor with Laconia). That didn’t take very long at all, and we were back home again by 3:30.

As soon as I thought Miss Nancy’s gunwales were dry enough, I moved her onto a pair of sawhorse, flipped her over, and varnished the outside of her hull. Here’s the starboard side:

Miss Nancy’s starboard side

And here’s the port.

Miss Nancy’s port side

She is in much better shape now than when I got hold of her. I will still need to sand the inside hull before I varnish that, but I don’t plan to spend a lot of time there. Just something to knock down the high spots in the fiberglass, wipe her down, and slather on a quick coat.

I also picked up a piece of maple today and cut out a new thwart. I shaped it with a 4-in-hand, but only on one side – then I petered out. Maybe I’ll finish that off tomorrow.

 

Bedstraw

The whorled loosestrife has bloomed.

Whorled loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia)

Penny woke me up from a nap this afternoon, so I went outside (it was beautiful). I was tooling around the backyard when I noticed the loosestrife in bloom. As I was taking the picture, Beth was sneaking up on me. She’s been trying to do this for some time, but I usually detect her when she’s quite a way off. Not today. She was right there when she announced her presence. I think she was pleased with herself (I know I would have been).

Then she asked if I wanted to go to Sandogardy Pond, and of course I did, so we stopped in the house for Penny’s leash and then set out.

The bugs weren’t bad, and the temperature was right around 70, or maybe even below (it’s 66 now). She talked pretty much the whole trip, which I enjoyed. We picked up trash, and she couldn’t figure out why people would just throw it on the ground like they do. I have to admit that it boggles my mind as well.

When we got to the pond I walked along the edge of the water looking for pipewort, but found none. Instead, I found a plant that I did not know:

Stiff marsh bedstraw (Galium tinctorium)

These flowers are tiny. I don’t think they’re even an eight of an inch across, and that made them pretty difficult to photograph. Autofocus couldn’t find them, so I had to whip out the tripod, put my finger next to the bloom, let it focus on that, move my finger, and then press the button (with a two-second delay since the exposure time was longish). This one came out semi-respectably. I found another clump of it further down the beach, and since it had a denser cluster of blooms, I took a shot of it as well.

Stiff marsh bedstraw (Galium tinctorium)

Then I looked it up in Newcombs (3 for 3 petals, 4 for whorled leaves, and 2 for smooth leaf margins, or 342). That’s the same index number as trilliums, but the index number is really just to get you close. Bedstraw was on the next page.

This is an unusual plant in that it’s a 3-petaled dicot. Most plants with three or (six petals) are monocots (i.e., narrow leaves, with parallel veins in them, like corn and lilies). The dicots have broader leaves (in general) and have branched veins.

I can’t think of another 3-petaled dicot. I may have to open the books again!

In other news, I have finally gotten around to working on restoring those canoes again. Miss Nancy is ready to varnish. Once that’s done, I can make her a new thwart, attach it, and mount the two seats, and she will be ready to paddle. Miss Emma will need gunwales attached (I milled them last fall), re-varnished, and then she can get trimmed out with the thwart-seat combo I made last year, plus her two original seats. Miss Sally only needs a section of gunwale repaired, and then have her thwart reattached. That’ s pretty much all that’s left.

We might get to paddle them by September.

 

Attaching the Inwales

Today I worked on attaching the newly-scuppered inwales to Miss Nancy. The first step is to dry clamp them to the hull up at the sheer line. Once an inwale was clamped on, I was able to mark it for cutting. Truth be told, I cut them a little short, but I used some pieces of filler wood to get them to reach all the way to the stem.

Marking the inwale so it can be cut to length.

As you can see, it looks like I marked it in the right place, and I definitely cut it on the mark. The problem was that I had not clamped it sufficiently so the inwale was bowing inwards a bit. Enough to make this mark be off by a quarter inch. That’s a LOT in the woodworking world, but I will recover.

Once I had the inwale cut to length, I mixed up some epoxy, painted it on, and then started clamping it into position. The initial clamp placement is just to hold it in place while I drill some pilot holes for the screws. Sometimes a clamp was in the way of drilling the hole, so I would have to move it. With all the holes drilled, I ran a steel screw into each hole and then backed it out again. The purpose of this little exercise is so that the brass screws don’t have to cut the threads in the wood. Doing so is very difficult with brass and often results in either mangling the divot in the top of the screw (where the bit grabs it) or twisting the screw in half.

With all the threads cut, I then made a second pass and set the brass screws in place. I put a screw between every other scupper, and I offset them from the center. The offset is because when I mount the seats and thwarts, I will want to drill a mounting hole there. I skipped every other scupper, because the outwales will attach there. When I get to that point.

Port side inwale clamped, glued, and screwed into place.

I had other things to do today, so once I got the port inwale glued and screwed into position, I let the glue set for a while. Also, I used every C clamp I could find (which is probably not all of the C clamps I own). I returned about six hours later and gave the starboard side the same treatment.

Ditto for the starboard inwale

With both inwales in place, I turned my attention to the bow deck. I should have mounted the stern deck first, because it does not have the inlay in it, so if I messed it up, it would not be a tragedy. It would be easy enough to make a new one. Luckily, all went well with the bow deck, so my impatience didn’t bite me. This time.

Bow deck

Fitting a deck is not an easy thing to do. The inwales’ inner surfaces do not go straight down, so a square cut along the edge (relative to the top of the deck) will not do. I measured the angle with a bevel gauge, and transferred the measurement to the edges of the deck.

The deck was quite a bit wider than it needed to be, so I had to trim it to the correct width. It’s really a little too wide, but I figured I could wedge it into place and spread the hull a little bit. Making it narrower would have meant the edges would have come all the way to the inlay – maybe even into the inlay, and after all the effort i put into doing that, there was no way I was going to let that happen. So I wedged it into place.

With the deck rough cut to the correct width, I placed it on a sanding belt and sanded the edges down to the correct (ish) angle. I didn’t get it exactly right, but I did come awfully close. Then I mixed up some more epoxy, painted the edges of the deck, mounted it in place, and ran some screws into it from the hull, through the inwale, and into the deck. The mess on top of the deck is where I mixed wood flour with the leftover epoxy to fill the gaps. They weren’t very wide, and now that they are filled, no one will notice.

I did not get around to fitting the stern deck. I will probably cut it to the width the boat wants it to be since it has no inlay. Or I may make it a little wider so that it kinda, sorta matches the bow.

Updates as progress warrants!

 

Scupper Me Gunwales!

Today I turned my attention to Miss Nancy’s gunwales. I had joined eight lengths of ash into four using scarf joints last week. Today I sanded the joints smooth (they are pretty difficult to see now, which is good), and then built a jig with which to scupper them.

I borrowed a router from my friend Shaun a couple of weeks ago thinking I was almost ready to do the scuppering, but… it took longer to get to that point than I had anticipated. The jig is just a piece of eighth-inch plywood with a few scraps attached to it – but attached very precisely. There’s a piece on the bottom that the gunwale gets clamped to, and then there are three on the top that the router’s bottom plate rides against.

I made one miscalculation while screwing the scraps to the plywood, which resulted in me running the router through one of the screws.

Oops!

Luckily, I was using my own router bit, and not one of Shaun’s. That could not have been good for its edge, but I was still able to cut wood with it.

Here’s the jig in action.

Scuppering Jig

The scuppers are those small areas of scooped-out wood. The scooped-out edge (or scuppered edge) will get glued and screwed to the inside of the hull. The scuppers reduce the weight a little bit, but more importantly, they will allow water to drain from the canoe when it’s heaved over on its side (presumably on land).

But the best thing about doing this is that I get to say “Scupper me gunnels!” in a piratey voice.

Maybe tomorrow evening I will have a chance to attach them to the hull. Then I can fit the decks, and attach the outwales. Miss Nancy is almost ready.

 

Last of the Glass

I glassed the inside of Miss Nancy today. First I had to sand the interior hull, and I guess that took about an hour. I used up my last sheet of 40 grit paper and had to switch to 80 before I finished. That took about an hour or maybe two – I don’t know what time I started. But it was ready to glass at noon, and the temperature was right at 70 degrees – perfect.

But first I ate lunch. Once that job starts, there’s no stopping until the first layer of epoxy is on. First I cut the glass cloth to length and laid it in the boat.

Ready for epoxy

I smoothed it out as best I could, and then started wetting it out with epoxy, starting about a quarter of the way from the bow and working towards the bow stem.

Wetting out the bow.

Up near the stem was far and away the most difficult place. There’s not a lot of room there, and you can’t even think about applying the epoxy with the squeegee. I had to use a paint brush. I got epoxy all over my sleeves too, but I knew that was going to happen before I got dressed this morning. So I was prepared.

Once I reached the stem, I went back to the starting point and started moving towards the stern.

Moving aft

I cut the glass off at the sheer line as I progressed. That was because the weight of the dead glass was pulling the “live” glass off the hull up near the gunwales. Removing the weight put an end to that.

It took me four hours to get the first layer of epoxy down.

Ta-da!

Then I needed to wait three hours and add the second layer. By then Beth was home from school and excited about going to “Safe Kids 500,” a bicycle safety event at the New Hampshire Speedway. That was the first I had heard about it, but it sounded too cool to pass up. They would have helmet checks (etc) and then the kids got to ride their bikes around the racetrack. It was just over a mile long (Wikipedia says it’s 1.058 miles). It took her about five minutes per lap which I guess is about 12 MPH.

After the first lap

I would not have been able to go at all except that Eric and his daughter Joy were planning to be there too. Beth really wanted me to be there, and I kinda wanted to see it and get a few pictures. I still had two hours before the canoe needed the second coat of epoxy, so I was in.

After Eric & Joy arrived, I didn’t stay too long at all. Epoxy waits for no man.

Leaving the infield

I got home just in time for the second (and final) coat. That one only took about thirty minutes since the glass was all in place and it doesn’t need to soak in like the first coat does. I’m not sure I’ll be able to work on it any tomorrow, but if I do, it will be time to sand the epoxy. I didn’t have time to “scupper me gunwales” (which I like to say in a pirate voice) so that task still awaits. Once they’re scuppered, I can attach the inwales & decks, then the outwales, then the seats and thwart. Actually, I need to make a thwart, but that’s a fairly quick task since it will be a simple yoke with no seat (unlike Miss Emma’s yoke).

 

What’s it Worth?

Sometimes when I am working on those wooden canoes I find myself questioning my sanity. For example, I noticed that Connor and I had used way more epoxy than we should have last week when we glassed the exterior hull of Miss Nancy. We went through about three quarts when we should have been able to do it with two. But he learned how to do it, so I think it was worth it.

Unfortunately, it does not leave me with enough to do the interior hull, so today I bought another gallon. That quantity of resin and hardener costs about $140. Or I could get a quarter as much for half that amount, but that’s crazy. I know I will be able to find a use for any that’s left over.

On the way home from getting the epoxy, I started adding up what I’ve spent on these three canoes. After the initial purchase price, I think I’ve added another $400-$500 in materials. Ouch. So I was discouraged, wondering if it was worth all that time, effort, and money.

Then today, I saw this:
http://canoeguybc.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/chestnut-canoes-for-sale-adopt-a-wood-canvas-canoe/
I’ve been following this blog for about six months, and have enjoyed every post. Today he listed prices for restored wood-canvas canoes. Now I do not imagine that I am as good a craftsman as Mike Elliot, and a cedar strip canoe is probably worth inherently less than a wood-canvas canoe. But I would hope that the canoes I am restoring will be worth at least half what he’s asking (the discount being mainly for my comparative dearth of skill and experience).

So yeah. It’s worth it.

Today I am gluing up the gunwales for miss Nancy. Tomorrow I will glass the interior, and in between coats I hope to scupper the inwales. We’ll see how it goes. Miss Nancy will almost certainly be finished before the end of May.

 

Saving Miss Nancy

On Wednesday I had Connor, one of my older Pathfinders come to the house and help me fiberglass Miss Nancy, the canoe I’ve been working on since last autumn.

Before we added glass, I wanted to put her name on her. I borrowed a Cricut, which is essentially a programmable paper cutter, and used that to cut out her name from a sheet of white vinyl shelf liner. I hand cut the flame logo (since our club is called the Central New Hampshire Flames).

I stuck it on, and then we laid the fiberglass over it. That label is not coming off, unless someone goes through the enormous amount of labor required to strip off the fiberglass like I did, but I don’t see that happening.

Miss Nancy gets a label

We draped the glass cloth over the boat and then began applying the epoxy. Connor got good at this fast. I wanted him to know how to do this so that I’m not the only one connected with the club who has that skill.

Connor helping me add a layer of glass

Early on we ran into a bit of trouble. The resin pumps are supposed to meter out the exact amount of epoxy – an equal number of squirts from the resin, and from the hardener gives the correct ratio. With this stuff, if you get the ratio wrong, it just doesn’t cure. Ever. SO it’s critical that it be correct.

When the pump started misbehaving, I knew what was wrong, because I feared it would happen. I had poured resin from my nearly empty can into the new can (that stuff is expensive – about $60-70 per gallon), and when I did it, I noticed hard lumps in the old resin. Groan. Those lumps were getting into the pump and messing it up. I figured we should pour it all back into the old can, and then strain it into the new can through a piece of cheesecloth. Only it was taking forever. That’s when Connor said “It’s too bad we can just attach the cheesecloth to the pump’s intake.”

That kid is a genius. I went down to the basement and grabbed some zip ties. In short order we had fastened the cheesecloth to the pump’s intake, and voila. Problem solved. The pump behaved perfectly from there on out.

It took us pretty much all day to get two layers of epoxy on the glass. I picked him up at nine, we stopped to get some latex gloves, and started mixing epoxy at about 10:30 or eleven. We had to let the first layer cure for three hours before adding the second coat. After each coat has been on the boat for 20-30 minutes, you have to use a squeegee to squeege it off again. We finished squeeging the second coat at about 7:30pm. I took him home, and then at 10:00pm, I went out and added the third coat. Each coat takes less time than the previous one, so I was done with that one at about 11:00.

In the morning, the boat looked great, and I could tell that it was orders of magnitude stronger. It was at this point that I knew Miss Nancy had been saved. The rest of the work is important too, but this was critical.

I turned my attention to the next task, which was to smooth the interior of the hull. Here’s my weapon of choice:

My violin plane

This is a violin plane. I made it myself about 10 years ago when I decided I wanted to build a violin. I never got around to building the violin, but this plane is nothing short of fantastic for smoothing the inside of a canoe. Its sole is curved in two directions – side-to-side, and front-to-back. A flat-soled plane is worthless for this job, but this plane made short work of it. I still have lots of sanding to do, but not nearly as much since I hit it with this plane.

Here are two shots so you can compare Miss Nancy’s progress:

Miss Nancy: Before

Miss Nancy: After

What a difference! The next step was to remove the top two planks. She’s going to have a little less freeboard than before, but those planks were pretty well rotted out, and I don’t have a mold for this boat, so replacing them was not going to be easy. I decided to just make her a little shorter. I cut them off with a coping saw and then planed them smooth.

Looking Good!

Hopefully I can have the interior ready to glass sometime this week. We’ll see.

 

It’s Back!

Winter has returned to New Hampshire.

Back yard

We got about a half inch of snow today. When I got up there was ice all over the windshield of my car. This surprised me, but I guess it should not have.

Front Yard

Some people are probably pretty upset about winter’s last gasp, but I find it a welcome return. Maybe it will be enough to tide me over until next winter (or if I’m lucky, autumn).

Penny gets ready to catch a stick

Penny didn’t seem to care. All else becomes unimportant when there are sticks to be caught.

Spring will be back again, and soon I’m sure. We had chipmunks in the yard last week. This one was at the foot of the deck stairs.

Chipmunk

I opened the sliding glass door and he turned around, but he didn’t run off. Luckily, Penny didn’t see him as I took several shots.

Another thing I did last week was visit a virtual geocache in Franklin called “Abnaki Mortar” (sic – should be “Abenaki”) From the name, I couldn’t figure out what it was, but once I got there it was plainly obvious, and I felt silly for not knowing what to expect.

Abenaki Mortar

This is a mortar where the Abenaki Indians ground corn. European settlers used it too. I imagine they would have scooped the water out and tried to dry it a bit first. I was pretty pleased when I got here and saw what it was. I really like Native American history, especially here on the East Coast where almost none was recorded before they were driven out.

Meanwhile, I have been making slow but steady progress on the canoe. In spite of today’s snowstorm, we had a spot of nice weather last week. It was warm enough to consider epoxy work, so I considered it. And did it. I fit the instem into “Miss Nancy.”

New instem

That’s a tough proposition, as the stem is kind of the foundation of the boat. The brief period during which it was stemless, it was also exceedingly fragile. Once I got this new stem in place, it regained its strength plus some extra strength for good measure. Once the epoxy set on the instem, I attacked the outstem too:

Outstem attached

Instead of clamping the outstem in place, I screwed it into the instem with steel screws. Those came out once the glue set, and will be replaced with brass screws. I generally don’t drive brass screws into wood until I’ve used a steel screw to cut the threads in the wood. Otherwise, the brass screws will twist in two, or strip out. As it was, the steel screws themselves all snapped in half when I went to remove them. I haven’t decided how to deal with that yet. Now that the epoxy is set, the screws are more decorative than anything else. I think if I tried to remove the steel screw nubbins, all I would do is mangle the ash. I might just use some shortened brass screws to plug the holes and make it look good.

Since this was done, I also shaped the outstem so that it flows into the hull with sweeping curves. It looks pretty good now. I also mixed up some epoxy and wood flour and slathered it into the cracks between the planks. I still need to hit it with another layer of that mixture and sand it down, but once that’s done, it’ll be ready to take a new layer of glass. Then the strength will increase by another order of magnitude. Once that’s done, I can smooth the inside of the hull, slather on more epoxy/wood flour, and sand that, and then it will be ready for glass as well.

This is going to be a nice boat.

 

Canoe Deck

I have almost finished building a new deck for Miss Nancy. I inlaid our Pathfinder Club’s logo with zebrawood.

Central New Hampshire Flames Logo on a canoe deck in zebrawood

First I drew the logo onto a couple of quarter-inch thick pieces of zebrawood. Then I cut it out with a coping saw and placed it on the deck (which I had previously glued up from maple and walnut). Then I hit it with a light layer of spray paint, because that seemed like a good way to trace it. Turns out, that’s not precise enough, so I ended up laying the zebrawood shapes on the deck again and tracing them with a sharp knife. Once I had the shape transferred, I deepened the cuts with a very sharp knife and scooped out the in-between with a chisel. That was the hard part. For whatever reason, the elbows on both arms took the brunt of the soreness. It took me all day yesterday to get it to where I could fit the pieces into the cavities.

Then I mixed up some epoxy, added a bit of ash sawdust (well… sanddust, since it was from sanding, not from sawing) and mixed that in. Having the sanddust in there gives the epoxy a more solid look, and I wanted that in case there were gaps between the zebrawood and its cavity (and there were).

With the epoxy mixed up and poured into the cavity, I set the zebrawood in place, and then poured more epoxy on top of it to fill in any voids. Then came a part that was even harder than scooping out the cavity – waiting for the epoxy to set!

I left it overnight. The zebrawood was about an eighth of an inch higher than the deck, but that was OK. I had borrowed Warran’s benchtop sander (he’s one of the Pathfinder staff members), so I turned the whole thing over on top of that and sanded it until the zebrawood was level with the deck and the spray paint was gone.

I still have to square off the bottom, and varnish the underside (that would be difficult to do if I waited until it were installed). I will varnish the top side after it’s installed, and I am tempted to cover it with a layer of fiberglass just to be sure that zebrawood stays in place forever (fiberglass is transparent when it sets up). Before I can install it, I have to measure the required bevels so that the edges are flat against the gunwales. It will be a rolling bevel, meaning that it is different up at the tips verses down at the base. That part is not easy either.

This deck is a bout 18″ long. It’s funny that something this small is even called a “deck,” but it is. The decks go between the gunwales at either end of the canoe. One normally thinks of a deck as being something that can be stood upon. I suppose you could stand on these, but unless your balance was exceptional, not for very long!