Exciting day
Jan. 27th, 2010 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillI may have mentioned that I'm building another canoe. A Wee Lassie II.
Canoes of this type are normally built out of cedar, mostly. Cedar is light, flexible, easy to work, and comes in interesting colors. As a bonus, it smells good.
But cedar is expen$ive. And I'm, well, not well budgeted for such things right now. However, white pine is nearly as light, nearly as flexible, and about 40% of the cost of cedar. Martin has been talking about the possibility of making canoes out of white pine, as the cost of cedar keeps climbing and the quality keeps decreasing.
So today I went and bought white pine for my canoe. I had to call several stores on Monday, but I found a place that had "D and better white pine 1 x 6s, 14 feet long." I went over to look at it this morning.
Golly--white pine has the most amazing colorway. It's mostly cream, with streaks of--I kid you not--pink. The most beautiful subtle pink, like a sunrise just before it gets gaudy. I picked through the D-and-better stack (you're not supposed to do this, but a place with a lot of wood will often make an exception for canoe-builders) until I found a few boards that cried out "pick me, pick me; I was born to be a canoe board!"
Then I walked down and had a quick look at the western red cedar thinking I would find a board to make a dark stripe near the top and a dark eye near the bottom. They were supposed to be D-and-better too but they were significantly worse quality. Much bigger knots and hardly a board with fewer than three. And instead of being 25$ a board, they were 45$ a board for smaller boards.
So I gave up on the idea and paid for my white pine and took it away to the high school woodshop, where Martin was very kind about helping me cut it. Then he kindly let me use the shop as long as I wanted (it was after school, so nobody else as there) as I sorted the boards into "mostly cream" "cream with a pink stripe" "kind of pinkish" and "strongly pink" piles, and taped up each pile and put them away. The point of the sorting is that it looks nice to have matched boards on each side.
I will be going back tomorrow to plane the strips and put the cove and bead edges on them, so on the way home I stopped by another lumberyard I know (that hadn't had the white pine but has a bigger selection of the fancier woods) and picked up a board of butternut that might work to make a dark stripe in the hull. I only hope the kind of cool brown of the butternut will work with the pink of the white pine, which I expect will fade to orange over time. We shall see. I'm also planning to make the outer gunwales of a strip of walnut on the inside laminated to a strip of ash on the outside which I hope will give a racing stripe effect (plus hopefully make the gunwales stronger by letting me stagger the scarf joints), so I picked up a board of ash and a board of walnut. If I chose right I will also be able to make the thwart, the handles and the seat frame out of ash and or walnut. I'm still thinking about how to make the decks. I'm almost tempted to make forms for the decks and make them out of cedar (or in this case white pine and butternut) strips. If that method produces a strong enough hull, why not a deck?
And, by the by, I have been thinking that if I got walnut veneer and glued it over the ash and then shaped the thwart, the veneer would stay only on the high parts of the ash and make these swoopy puddle-y dark shapes over the white ash. I could then use my new carving tools to carve letters or a design into the thwart and it should show white(ash) through the dark(walnut) veneer. Maybe wolf prints. Or some kind of twining vine.
Probably most of these fancy ideas will fall by the wayside. Building a boat takes long enough.
Hmm. A compass rose would be nice.
Canoes of this type are normally built out of cedar, mostly. Cedar is light, flexible, easy to work, and comes in interesting colors. As a bonus, it smells good.
But cedar is expen$ive. And I'm, well, not well budgeted for such things right now. However, white pine is nearly as light, nearly as flexible, and about 40% of the cost of cedar. Martin has been talking about the possibility of making canoes out of white pine, as the cost of cedar keeps climbing and the quality keeps decreasing.
So today I went and bought white pine for my canoe. I had to call several stores on Monday, but I found a place that had "D and better white pine 1 x 6s, 14 feet long." I went over to look at it this morning.
Golly--white pine has the most amazing colorway. It's mostly cream, with streaks of--I kid you not--pink. The most beautiful subtle pink, like a sunrise just before it gets gaudy. I picked through the D-and-better stack (you're not supposed to do this, but a place with a lot of wood will often make an exception for canoe-builders) until I found a few boards that cried out "pick me, pick me; I was born to be a canoe board!"
Then I walked down and had a quick look at the western red cedar thinking I would find a board to make a dark stripe near the top and a dark eye near the bottom. They were supposed to be D-and-better too but they were significantly worse quality. Much bigger knots and hardly a board with fewer than three. And instead of being 25$ a board, they were 45$ a board for smaller boards.
So I gave up on the idea and paid for my white pine and took it away to the high school woodshop, where Martin was very kind about helping me cut it. Then he kindly let me use the shop as long as I wanted (it was after school, so nobody else as there) as I sorted the boards into "mostly cream" "cream with a pink stripe" "kind of pinkish" and "strongly pink" piles, and taped up each pile and put them away. The point of the sorting is that it looks nice to have matched boards on each side.
I will be going back tomorrow to plane the strips and put the cove and bead edges on them, so on the way home I stopped by another lumberyard I know (that hadn't had the white pine but has a bigger selection of the fancier woods) and picked up a board of butternut that might work to make a dark stripe in the hull. I only hope the kind of cool brown of the butternut will work with the pink of the white pine, which I expect will fade to orange over time. We shall see. I'm also planning to make the outer gunwales of a strip of walnut on the inside laminated to a strip of ash on the outside which I hope will give a racing stripe effect (plus hopefully make the gunwales stronger by letting me stagger the scarf joints), so I picked up a board of ash and a board of walnut. If I chose right I will also be able to make the thwart, the handles and the seat frame out of ash and or walnut. I'm still thinking about how to make the decks. I'm almost tempted to make forms for the decks and make them out of cedar (or in this case white pine and butternut) strips. If that method produces a strong enough hull, why not a deck?
And, by the by, I have been thinking that if I got walnut veneer and glued it over the ash and then shaped the thwart, the veneer would stay only on the high parts of the ash and make these swoopy puddle-y dark shapes over the white ash. I could then use my new carving tools to carve letters or a design into the thwart and it should show white(ash) through the dark(walnut) veneer. Maybe wolf prints. Or some kind of twining vine.
Probably most of these fancy ideas will fall by the wayside. Building a boat takes long enough.
Hmm. A compass rose would be nice.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 03:38 am (UTC)BTW, a hull is strong partly because of its shape. A deck, maybe not so much--it might have to be thicker. Depends on what kind of forces it's intended to resist.
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Date: 2010-01-28 12:21 pm (UTC)And it's not unusual for me to put a canoe on the rack by resting the tip of the upside down canoe on the rack and walking it forward. A flat deck doesn't get in the way of this maneuver; an arched deck probably would.
Though a Wee Lassie II might be light enough that I didn't need to do this.
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Date: 2010-01-28 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 12:23 pm (UTC)Tools are always the trick.
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Date: 2010-01-28 05:27 am (UTC)Now, what would go really cool with all this lovely woodwork would be a custom-etched nameplate. Wonder if
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Date: 2010-01-28 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 05:44 am (UTC)Pine certainly has interesting colors. One fairly common one is kind of a woad blue.
I like the difference between the really large grain in the western red cedar versus the Tenn. (?) Red Cedar with a finer grain.
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Date: 2010-01-28 05:45 am (UTC)It sounds lovely!
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Date: 2010-01-28 12:29 pm (UTC)I have not seen blue yet. I bet it's interesting. I have thought in passing of building a boat of light wood and staining it blue before the epoxy step, but don't really have the nerve for that.
The major types of cedar I know of are Western Red Cedar, Eastern(?) White Cedar and Alaskan(?) Yellow Cedar. I wouldn't expect fine grain to come from a tree in Tennessee, because our hot weather and wet climate usually means a long growing season, so that trees put on more girth in a year, leaving more room between rings. But I don't know all that much about wood, being fairly new at woodworking, so maybe I'm wrong.
Within a type, woodworkers seem to prize fine-grained wood over coarse grained.
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Date: 2010-01-28 05:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 08:07 pm (UTC)For the gunwales he ripsawed a long ash pickpole, getting two nice long hemicircle cylinders.
IMHO, ash will flex more before breaking than walnut and it's lighterweight.
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Date: 2010-01-28 09:40 pm (UTC)I appreciate your insights with regard to ash vs walnut. The gunwales as proposed will be a 3/8 strip of walnut next to the hull and a 3/8 strip of ash on the outside. At the moment I'm leaning toward making the inside gunwales just a 3/8 strip of ash. Since the canoe is only 13' 6" I'm not *too* worried about the weight and I think the laminated gunwales (I will bend both of them along the sheer itself to laminate them together, which if I do it right should glue the proper curve right in) will be strong as well as looking sharp.
I talked this over with Martin (my shop teacher friend who builds canoes) and he thought it would work. He has been teaching woodshop for about 20 years and seems to have a pretty good idea of what wood will and won't do, so if he's comfortable with it, I'm going to try it.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 05:08 am (UTC)A-cnother canoe
*g, d & paddle*
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Date: 2010-01-29 01:47 pm (UTC)