Shopsmith Forums

A momentous day for the slow boat! Off the mold!
Right side up!
In the cradle!
So...much...sanding to do!

That is a piece of work for sure!

You are still welcome to bring it to our lake, 12 months a year available .....

Beautiful! When they are right side up it becomes clear why they are called "vessels"

Wow! When right side up, it becomes a new project. So pretty looking - it's almost scary to do the inside work. Nice you can carry it outside once and a while to re furbish the porch.

It's been fun following the story. How does the young man feel about it?

He's excited to get on the water with it. He's not excited to help do the woodworking. It's ok. Maybe someday he will take an interest.

charlese wrote:Wow! When right side up, it becomes a new project. So pretty looking - it's almost scary to do the inside work. Nice you can carry it outside once and a while to re furbish the porch.

It's been fun following the story. How does the young man feel about it?

shipwright wrote:Looks great Al. You are doing everything right.
You must be getting excited about getting her out on the water.

I am sure such encouragement from the master has to 'buoy' thy spirits.

Paul has been an incredible resource during this project. Yes his encouragemt has been, uh, encouraging but he has also provided advice and guidance. What you see publicly is probably about half of the questions I have had for Paul and he has patiently answered every one and not once showed even the tiniest amount of annoyance. He is a gem.

JPG wrote:

shipwright wrote:Looks great Al. You are doing everything right.
You must be getting excited about getting her out on the water.

I am sure such encouragement from the master has to 'buoy' thy spirits.

Taking a break from sanding the interior, I want to make my canoe decks so the grain lines converge. The technique explained in one of my canoe books is to cut a rectangular piece of wood along the diagonal between opposite corners, which gives two right triangles. One triangle is flipped and rotated and then the two triangles are then joined along their hypotenuses.

I decided to experiment with some oak I had laying around (the real decks ultimately will be made of sapele). I started with a board 12 x 4 x 3/4. I drew the diagonal and then cut it free hand on the band saw.

Here's the result. The grain lines do converge. The bottom will be cut in a semi-circle, which is marked very roughly with pencil.
Now, to complicate matters, I wanted to put a slight crown or camber on the deck. To do this, I decided to put a slight angle on the hypotenuses. I decided to put a 5 degree angle on each side.

Here's the result.
And a view standing on edge to better show the angle between the two triangles.
I spent a lot of time thinking how I could use the Shopsmith to cut those angles along the hypotenuses of the triangles. No obvious solution presented itself to my feeble mind. Ultimately I gave up and used my jointer. I set the jointer fence to 85 degrees put the hypotenuse down, registered the face of the triangle to the fence and fed one triangle point first and the other base first so the angles would be in opposite directions. It worked, but I am interested how others would accomplish this on the Shopsmith.

Another question: When I do the real decks in sapele I will join the two halves with epoxy mixed with cotton fibers, which is a standard way of gluing assemblies used in boat building. I think this glue will be strong enough on its own since this is long grain to long grain and the epoxy/fibers make a super strong water proof glue. But I could also add a spline. I think the spline would be overkill but I am soliciting opinions.

Lurking for a while on your project, Al, and it's beautiful. As to your question, you don't need a spline. My suggestion is to join the two pieces as you have them (assuming you like the peak) with epoxy, but before joining make sure there's some "tooth" on the jointed edges so the epoxy has a place to bridge. Unlike wood glue, epoxy requires a bit of gap in order to make strong joints.

Better yet, if you are truly concerned about a heavy weight on those end decks, increase the included angle a couple degrees so you have a "v" with the open end down toward the hull. Fill that with thickened epoxy and it's not going anywhere.

Frankly, if you are going to glass the deck side, even the extra v-ness is unnecessary. As you've figured out, epoxy is stronger than the wood.

Really a beautiful project and the choice of wood is going to turn out fantastic. Thank you 1000 times for sharing the project and posting the pictures. Please keep them coming.

EDIT - one thing, I've not heard of using cotton fibers to thicken epoxy. I've used wood flour and silica. Wood flour seems to me to be the best for me. How well do you like the cotton fiber?