Exciting day

[catsittingstill]

I 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.

Comments

[pstratt.livejournal.com]

I managed to mess up the first sentence. :(

It sounds lovely!