My buddy Chad has a pile of tongue and groove cedar salvaged from a wall during a renovation. After building a few adairondack chairs he asked me one day if we could build a boat with it. I said we could sure try, and the idea was born. All my time spent perusing Duckworks Magazine paid off when I recalled a short 1 person canoe that had been featured a year or so earlier, the EasyB by Skip Johnson. He was kind enough to post PDF plans on Duckworks which I downloaded in mid January.

Chad and I have been getting together once a week since the end of January and are slowly setting his garage up as a shop to make not one, but two EasyB cedar strip canoes from the salvaged wood. Guiding us in our quest will be information gleaned from articles written by the designer on www.duckworks.com, the helpful denziens of the Duckworks Yahoo Group forum, and Gary Dierkings book, Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes

 

I will document some of the highlights of the build, as there are a number of good books and other resources that describe the process. We are going to try to tally our expenses for the build, to date we are at about $60 for multiple copies of full size plans, wood to finish the stong backs, glue and a few pine boards to use as accent strips.

 

Not having written plans can be daunting at first, but it does make you read a good bit and consider each step. I am not focusing on a quick cheap build for once, I hope that we make some beautiful canoes, at an inexpensive price and have a lot of fun hanging out.

 

The PDFs from Duckworks are sized to 11" x 17", I don't have a printer that can accomadate that so I emailed them to Kinkos. There are a total of 16 station molds, plus a bow and stern mold.  To make the sheets a manageable size, it appears that Skip (hope he doesn't mind the familiar even though I have never met him) made upper and lower drawings for the bow and stern half breadth sections. I printed 16 copies of each, for a total of 64 sheets, so Chad and I could cut out and tape together a full set of mold templates. Along with that couple copies of the plan overview and bow and stern molds. Pretty cool to see the plans full size!

 

Over the next few weeks, we spent a couple hours each Wednesday night in his driveway cutting the cedar into 1/4" strips. Did I mention that living in Florida is awesome, t-shirt evenings for the most part and beer cozies to keep our hands from getting too cold during breaks. We guestimated the amout of strips we would need, hope we don't have to cut more. We used the featherboard setup on a table saw described in Gary Dierkings Building Outrigger sailing canoes.

 

 

 

Next step was to take some 10' walk boards made out of 2x6 and ply and turn them into strong backs. A few 2x3s and Chad had a couple sturdy tables to build on.

 

This past Monday, we spent our time cutting out the patterns, and taping them together while listening to Van Morrison and Save Ferris. Hopefully tonight we can glue them to the pegboard we bought and start cutting the molds out. His wife and my fiance (just about typed "my girlfriend", I actually proposed to her this past weekend!!!) wonder what the heck we are doing. All they have seen are a few empty beer cans, a lot of sawdust and two tables that look like wierd art project dogs. In a little over a month we have nothing that looks even remotely like a boat. But it has been fun so far, we take it easy listen to music and just focus on the task at hand.

 

 

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