Cape Falcon kayaks have sparked our interest for a few years, the lightweight design and aesthetical finesse that these canoes achieve matches with no other. We decided to purchase the 66 canoe because the plans are incredibly versatile- you can add alterations anywhere into the building formulas with ease. Consequentially, the course is much more hands on, and although guided through every step you can add your flare of creativity. This is not a flat pack ikea set.
We decided to build 15’1” single blade canoes with a 30” width and 12” deep. We also loved the way Brian’s asymmetrical canoes look with the added tumblehome, so decided to commit those added details into the plans.
Catching Up – the second and third canoes – 03/04
So today is the 3rd of April and its about the second day of work using the actual guidebook written by Mr Schulz to build our cape falcon 66 canoes for our environmental education river journey. I think it’s fair to say we’re already noticing significant differences in both process and outcome compared to when we were just taking (occasionally) educated guesses and having a go based on free content from Youtube.
Although, we haven’t been idle. For the last few months we’ve been raising funds to help sponsor our river expedition and education project. We then found a supportive local school in which we can use the workshop, and then with the help of the school children, calcualted and then ordered our quarter sawn Ash and flat sawn Douglas Fir timber for our construction. In fact, based on a combination of free content and guess work, we’ve already made the wooden frame for one of our three skin on frame canoes.
Our First Canoe frame
All three of us are passionate about ecology, wildlife and education. By building canoes and paddling down the longest river in Scotland, we hope to, maybe, catch the attention of the primary school children who we will be stopping to meet along the way long enough to run our educational ecology based sessions. You can see more about our project and how we plan to use the canoes here.
But now it gets interesting. As we progress with our second and third canoes according to the handbook, we are already beginning to notice differences. At the very least it’s going a lot faster now and not least because we’ve got a bit more experience. The sheer mathematics provided in the handbook is speeding up our progress no end.
Perhaps more importantly than speed, the gunwales for our second and third canoes are proving to be rather significantly different in shape. Chiefly, wider and more tastefully asymetrical. This is promising. Our new gunwale shape looks very pleasing.
However – it has already got us thinking about which of us is going to be attempting to run this river in canoe number one!
Before we get started we would like to warn/prepare you for the mixed jumble of metric and imperial values, we are just as scrambed as you! a bunch of brits doing it US style…
Timber – 25/03
We headed to Logie steading timber mill and although they didnt stock western red cedar they had a good stock of green ash that we could use for the ribs. Due top our tight schedule for the expedition we decided to go for what they had in stock which was larch and douglas fir – our build is going to be substantially heavier than Cape falcons builds. We got the ash milled up to 1” thick boards and calculated our longest rib length with the formula for the board length. The softwood was all planed down to ¾” for our laminations.
Our “green” ash being quarter sawn at Logie sawmill.
Steaming setup – 29/03
Firstly we set out to build our steaming set up which is comprised of a beer keg with a 1.5m welded pipe to the top that led to the steamer box. We had a door on the front of the steaming box but after a test run that included getting lightly burnt when we opened the box we decided to take inspiration from Brians system with a small opening and a towel over the front. we would fill up the keg from a small holein the side via a siphon and an old piece of gas hose.
Beer keg steaming set up.
Rocker and laminating gunwales – 30/03
We set aside our top plank of the gunwale laminations and marked the positions of the ribs 5” apart leaving a 17” margin each end. We then chocked up the plank by the amount of our planned rocker of 2 ⅛” bow and stern. Heights from the floor were then measured at each rib location – essential values we will use later to calculate each rib lengths. The Gunwale was then laminated (douglass fir sandwiched in between two planks of larch) to a sheer of 6”- Regrettably, this is too shallow and we wish we had glued a 7” sheer as Brian suggests.
Sheer measurements and building the deck – 31/03
The lamination was ripped in two to make our two 1” gunwales that were then cut to 15’1”. One gunwale was laid on its side on the floor with a string line to measure the sheer fore and aft for the stem and rib length calculations. Rib mortises were then cut for each rib to slot into.
Now for the exciting bit – we cut and screwed in our central spreader and bent the bow and stern ends to meet together, it now starts to look something like a canoe!
Gunwales bent to form our deck.
The gunwale ends were then kerfed together, lashed and dowelled to make a satisfying glue free joint. The temporary stems were cut out of our flat sawn hemlock plank to accomodate for a recurve stem and thus the board width we used was 11 1/2” wide. The Keel was set ontop of a depth baton clamped to the central spreader of 12” and used the stem calculations to cut the height of the stem. After remeasuring the rocker to ensure it was what we planned it had all worked out perfectly!
Temporary stems and keel attached.
To finish off the day we cut and planed all the ribs (6.7mm thick) we would need with a significant error margin- we needed 30 ribs, but cut an extra 20 just incase – a very wise decision!
Steam bending the ribs – 01/04
We fired up the beer steamer to steam in some test ribs, ensuring our ribs had been cut to the right length and that our measuring stick was doing its job well. We sent a photo to Brian who quickly responded with some words of relieving reassurance that the geometry looked great.
With the first canoe, (our ugly duckling) we began steaming at 3pm, severely underestimating the time it would take to steam and went through to 3am – it was a night of many snapped ribs. However, this time we learnt from our mistakes and began as ewarly as possible. At this stage we had come to the conclusion that our bending stock wasnt the best, and so blessed each rib as we whittled down the ends to fit tighly into the mortises. After all, ideally bending ash should be felled maximum 6 months to a year before, whereas our log was 2 years old! If it is too dry we can soak it to better its bending performance.
Steam bending in the ribs with some kind friends – No 12 bore a grudge but gave in after 4 replacements.
All the ribs steam bend into place, some irregularities towards the stern as you can see but they will hopefully “come out in the wash” and bow down to the stringers.
The ribs maintain some of their flex for quite some time as they slowly set into their new position. Consequentially, we needed to get the stringers on as quickly as possible to ensure any minor rib adjustments could happen as the stringers pull the canoe into longitudinal order.
With the stringers clamped on and the ribs settling in nicely we can now drop tools – Smiley takes the nearest exit to some sleep time.
Lashing the stringers – 03/04
4 stringers were used on each side of the canoe and were spaced according to Brian shultz’s reccomendations (just like almost all other elements of this build).
