So life having gone filk for a while, made a quick left turn into canoe

[catsittingstill]

Day before yesterday I called around, checking on wood availability.  Yes, Anderson Lumber has its usual white pine grade D and better (which is frankly pretty darn good in white pine, much better than the same grade in cedar), lovely pink and cream colorway (pity it doesn't stay), 1 x 6 x 14 feet long for 25$ a board. 

Jeffries Woodworks had 1 x 8 CEDAR.  GRADE A.  2 19 foot boards and 5 20 foot boards!  For 4 dollars a lineal foot.  They would even cut it and sell me just 14 feet if I wanted.

After agonizing for a couple of days, this morning I 1) bought 16 feet of one of the cedar boards (after taxes it came to almost 70$.  Ow.) and 2) bought four of the white pine boards. 

This actually gives me more wood than I need, but I'm thinking of it as an investment.  Who am I kidding?  This is not going to be my last boat.  Part of the reason I bought 16 feet is my next boat may be longer.

Then I proceeded to Maryville High  and Martin kindly helped me rip them all into strips about 1/32nd over .250 inch.  This way we can plane them down in the planer and get consistent thickness, which believe me makes fairing the boat easier.  While we were at it we also ripped some beautifully colored cherry I had bought months ago for precisely this build into pieces slightly over 3/8 inch thick.  The cherry was inexpensive (for cherry) because it had lots of splits in it, but I think I can scarf them out and make some gunwales that will look really sharp against the white pine.

I came back home just before dinner, persuaded Kip to make dinner, ate, cleaned up the kitchen from two days of neglect plus the soup boiling over because that's how Kip makes soup, and ran out to the store to get gas (because I'm going back to Maryville for the morning class and need to leave the house by 7:15 am) and milk because the last of it went into the soup (which was good soup--only a little of it was lost to the stove.)

Now I shall have my snack and go to bed, because, you know, 7:15 am.

Good night.

Comments

[thymidinekinase.livejournal.com]

The wood sounds beautiful; I love the look of a rich cherry color. What sort of class are you taking?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It's not a class, so much--it's that Martin's shop class makes two or three boats a year, so Martin has all the tools, years of experience and legions of husky young men to help putting boards through the table saw, the planer, and the router, in order to make wood strips to make a canoe.

One of these days I'm going to have to fix the tablesaw part of the Shopsmith, and make a router table, and make my own setup to make planks, because Martin is nearing retirement, but while he and his setup are available, I shamelessly make use of them.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

This post reminded me of this.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The prices seem very reasonable to me...

Of course, maple is very heavy wood--birdseye maple is beautiful, but I will stick to plainer, lighter-weight woods for my decks, I think.

[boywizard.livejournal.com]

Gah!!! I'm drooling with envy - no one around here has any long clear cedar at any price. The best I can do locally is sixteen-foot heavily knotted 1x8s, which I suspect are intended for fence-building. Anything lengthy I would have to get by mail-order, with motor freight shipping starting at over $100. My two boats were built in pieces, so long boards weren't necessary, but now that my shop space could cope with a twenty-two foot boat, I would much prefer to work with something long. (no long white pine, either; I could get some passable Douglas fir, but I don't know how it would be as material for a stripper, and it would need considerable milling)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Douglas fir has a reputation for being brittle. But I'm pretty sure I've heard of people successfully building boats out of it.

Spruce is probably used most often after cedar--can you lay hands on spruce?

Also, where are you? If it's practical I could drive some white pine--or even some cedar--to a con and we could swap it to your car there. It would be a long-term thing, of course, not the kind of thing we could do tomorrow, but it's something to think about.

Though I'm not sure I can get white pine 24 feet long, which is what I suspect you would need for a 22 foot boat. And the cedar tops out at 20 feet