Building a Cedar-Strip Canoe in 30 Days!

when I was eight years old my uncle gave me a canoe paddle for my birthday and that included an invitation to spend summers paddling through the Adirondacks with my aunt knuckle which we cute silly names Catholic Fox and so every summer for as long as I can remember I've gotten to spend here paddling in these beautiful handmade wooden canoes when I was 11 my uncle founded Otter Creek small craft which is it's a one-person operations building as you probably deduced by now mr. Cano is custom-built in Vermont and when I turned 18 my birthday gift was a canoe which is insane to give to an 18 year old you're insane by the way I mean say okay certifiably insane and because I had no space to store a canoe I asked if I could postpone the gift until after I graduated from college and then I graduated from college with an interest in making things and so last Christmas this gift sort of morphed into why don't you come spend a month in Vermont and learn to make your own canoe please hang tight through this entire video it's longer than most of my videos but I think it's worth it yeah enjoy [Music] once the forms are up the first thing to do is to start shaping the stems these are really thin strips of cedar that have been soaking in boiling water for about ten minutes and we just wrap them around the front of the form let them dry and then glue them together to laminate them then it's just a matter of shaping them with a hand plane to make the strip's sit really nicely over them then we rips down our dimensional lumber of western red cedar on the tables my uncle signature is a future strip that has these little Chevron's made of SAP wood and those are paired in between sections of a dark dark hardwood so we just cut the little shapes and then glued it together [Music] and I love watching the pattern get revealed on the table saw when we trim off all the excess most strip boats are built out of strips that have a bead routed out of one end and a cove routed out of the other side and this lets the strip's nestled together over curves and not leave gaps where light can show through so we took all of our square ended strips and routed beads and coves into them the first strip is clipped the forums along the shear line and then trimmed to fit within the stems and glutenous once that was securely in place we could build the rest of the strips on top of it so to do that we basically just ran a bead of wood glue along the cove of each strip and then fit it onto the previous strip trimmed it glued to the stems and repeated I also want to draw attention to the fact that all of the music you're hearing and background word tunes written by my uncle and recorded by my aunt uncle spans Atlantic crossing and frost and fire the only exception is that the very last song you'll hear over the maiden voyage is called the aviatrix and it was actually written by my aunt and she wrote it for me when I flew an airplane soloing for the first time [Music] once the strips reach the top of the stems we switch over to just stripping on one side and we'll do that all the way until we reach the centerline at which point we can put down a chalk line and cut a perfect line from stem to stem and then on the other side we just have to make strips match up once [Music] here's a good look at the way beating Cove latches to dinner [Music] but the stripping done it was time to ferry into shape which means a lot of planing and then a lot of sanding [Music] I wanted to inlay a cosmetic Center strip that matched the width and the lines of both the exterior stems and the interior stems which were different widths which meant that we had to route and then install two separate Center strips one on the exterior and one above the interior so for each strip we only routed about an eighth of an inch down and then glued the strip in and then when we flip it over we'll route another one and what's really nice about them being different widths is it actually prevents any light show through because there's a stab in the center strip before fiberglassing the entire hole with four ounce fiberglass we went over the stems of the 12 ounce fiberglass tape just for extra reinforcement and then to put on the logos we printed them on to you overhead transparency and then just epoxy them directly to the wood and with those in place we can move on to fiberglass and the entire hole now fiberglass is how boats get on those to their strength and it's applied by rolling this sheet of literally two fiberglass onto the boat and then pouring epoxy over and allowing it to seep through the weave adhering it to the wood it's a really satisfying process and once you get the hang of it it can be pretty fun [Music] and you'll notice that as long as you have a perfectly clear epoxy like this one which is the total boat two to one high-performance epoxy as the epoxy soaks into the fiberglass it turns it completely clear and that's because fiberglass and epoxy have the same refractive index which means as light passes through it it doesn't Bend which means it's clear [Music] when the epoxy is green which is when it started to set but it's not completely cleared yet that's the best time to cut off the excess paper because it just feels really easily it takes about four coats of epoxy to completely bury the leave at which point you can sand it super smooth and that gets the service ready for friendship but varnishing will happen at the very end so now it's time to pull out the forums and flip it over for the first time because boat-like features this part is pretty much the same as the outside the only difference being that the random orbital sander can't really get up the curbs very well so it was just a lot of time with a card scraper before going and with a lot of Hansen and on the inside we routed a thinner center strip glued it in place and then complained it down the steep recurve on this particular design of bow and stern makes it really difficult for one sheet of fiberglass to go all the way up into the nose and lay perfectly flat so what we did is fiberglass it in three sections and honestly it looks perfectly seamless [Music] yeah Peter is that kind of uncle now you know what I've been putting up with my whole life then a few more epoxy coats and the weave is buried and that concludes the construction of the hole once it's sanded of course instead of making you watch me sand I'm gonna introduce the sponsor for today's video 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honey for free at join honey calm slash silent since the gunnels deck seats thou'rt etc all happened kind of at the same time that it stops being perfectly chronological just so it makes more sense but you can always see what day things are happening in the bottom of the corner once the gunnels were completely ripped and routed we went in with the oscillating saw and cut the shear line about like one millimeter above where the shear line actually is so that gives us a little bit of wiggle room to plane down to the gunnels later on and then it was time to epoxy the scupper pieces scupper pieces are the inserts that let the in whales stand off from the whole sheeting which leaves the skutters which is the holes behind and those are great for making the boat lighter but also tying stuff in and for draining water so the longer pieces that you see are at the fort and the seats and that's just because there's more strain on the bolts there with the in whales and they're scuppers fully assembled and cleaned up we could epoxy them to the inside of the hole [Music] this just means carefully lining it up with the midpoint and also the shear line and then using lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of claims the out whales which are the outer strip of the gunnels are a little easier to assemble just because they have no scuppers so that was just some epoxy and then a lot of clips also I think it's important to note that the gunnels the thort deck Thord seats etc are all made of cherry so all of the trim is cherry which is much harder and stronger and for added strength we also screwed the gums together using a special depth stopped countersunk drill bit meaning that we can go in with a piece of cherry we make on a plug cutter and fill in that hole to make it nice and pretty and then we cleaned up the gunnels by sanding off the tops of those plugs as well as planing down the shear line to meet the gun awesome sanding it smooth moving on to the next we made these out of cut-offs from building the rest of the canoe and we cut and glued these into the same angle that the gunnels meet at the bow and stern to continue that line the decks are cedar stripped to save on weight but that does mean that for strength we need to fiberglass both sides so both sides get fiberglass and then sanded and then varnished before installation now since the decks aren't hardwood they're cedar strips they are not structural on their own so we have to make a hardwood deck for it to act as the structural component of the decks [Music] then to fit the deck for final assembly we just had to flatten the top most edge of the gunnels so that there is something for the cedar strip deck to adhere to and then we could just use a thick and epoxy mixture to put it all together [Music] and once the epoxy was fully cured we could just shape the deck to match the shape of the gunnels and move on to cutting the shape of the deck towards the e hole of the boat I chose this gentle arc just because I thought it was graceful and I just cut it out my jig saw and then went at it with a chisel I saw on a sandpaper just a lot of candles [Music] and to cover the awkward three layers that now make up the deck we just cut out really thin pieces of cherry to use as veneers cut them to shape and [Music] and once those are gluten and sanded smooth the decks are done to make the thort I drew the shape that I wanted onto a piece of cardboard and then traced it onto a piece of cherry and it's worth noting that I made the width exactly the width of my shoulders because it's come here for me whoa it's nice and made of thought that like is made to fit me kept running [Music] and then to finish it we just hit it with the round over bit on the table router and then sanded it and varnished it then it was just a matter of shaping it to fit around the gunnels like really nice and snug and then finding the center balance point of the community and the Thorton is done so here's my first solo canoe carry I was just really excited to try out that point to make these seat frames we put them together using simple mortise and tenon joinery to get that square frame and then epoxy it all together then to get them ready for caning we drilled holes at one inch increments all down the sides and then countersunk those holes then the frames just needed to get rounded over and varnished to prep for hanging the seats from the guns we used this homemade jig to countersink using a Forstner bit and then we drilled all the way through the gun although suppose hood normal straight bit afterwards then using the simple angle gauge we measured and cut seat fingers that fit all of the compound angles of the hole against the gun drilled them and measured out to the seats [Music] then we just needed to cane them and we use plastic pain rather than natural cages because it lasts a little longer it's great cat and with the seats fully canned we can move on to the hull and do a final sanding up to 220 grit which will get it ready for varnish then it's really important to clean the hole as well as you can because any dust or hair etcetera will show up in the final finish we built up about six coats of base varnish using total hoods Halcyon before switching over to lust which is what you're seeing here to use as a shiny glossy final coat Halcyon is water-based so it's really easy to clean up and way more eco-friendly and traditional varnishes but realistically you're not gonna get like the perfect finished coat with it so that's why we used the traditional varnish for the final finish and this is how we put on the layers of Halcyon I rolled it on with a really dense foam roller and then uncle Peter chased with a firm brush tipping it meaning that he was gently brushing a clock across the top removing all of the like weird texture and the bubbles but for the final kiss with lust we used badger hair brushes directly with no roller and with the varnish done it was just time to install the seats and head out on maiden voyage the purpose of this sliding bow seat is so that I as the left generally lighter person can paddle Stern and have a heavier person paddle in the bow without being how heavy or I can have someone lighter [Music] those it's it's really for when slows that Oh [Music] ma'am I'm looking for some water water that way hey miles no problem [Music] if you enjoyed this video please consider clicking the subscribe button and little bells that you get notified every time I post a new video additionally I've also made a longer more technical version of this build video and it's up on my patreon links down in the description [Music] thanks so much for watching to Commission a custom canoe visit my uncle's website at Otter Creek small craft comm and he's even offering guided builds like this one as an option see you there [Music]

Channel: Xyla Foxlin

Views: 1,426,145

Keywords: cedar strip canoe, wooden canoe, canoe build, canoe, woodworking, diy, maker, cedar, otter creek smallcraft, vermont, xyla, foxlin, strip boat

Id: mWvIqGlFhIo

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020