Badger hair

Decks, check. Gunwales, check.

Took advantage of the Memorial Day long weekend to not spend all my days off working on the boat, so Tracy and I spent Saturday hiking at Point Reyes. After picking up some Red Hawk cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery we found a new 12 mile loop starting at Muddy Hollow off of Limantour Rd on some trails we haven't been on before. Great spot - for a holiday weekend we only saw three other groups of people the whole time. We climbed up through a tunnel of trees to the top of Pt. Reyes Hill at 1300' for a good view over Tomales Bay and then headed back down near Drake's Estero past a wary group of cattle and over close to Limantour Spit before heading back to the car.
Sunday I finished trimming the trim and sanding the decks and I installed a "handle" made from a leftover piece of ash outwale spanning between the sides of the hull under each deck to reinforce them. They don't add much weight, but make the decks stronger and look stylish to boot.
On Monday I fit the seats, but didn't fully install them. That will be the very last thing after I'm done varnishing. I used the suggested seat jig recommended by Canoecraft. As usual with their recommendations, it worked.
I picked up everything I need for varnishing from West Marine as well. I went with the Epifanes high-gloss clear spar varnish. Its the best stuff out there with a price to match. And I picked up a badger hair brush. Who knew badger hair was the perfect thing for applying varnish?? Apparently it is.
Since it takes at least a day for each coat of varnish it doesn't look like I'm going to get the boat water ready for my Mom and sister's visit next week. But at least they'll be able to see it in pretty much it's finished form.
Next up is another cleaning and thorough dedusting of the garage before I varnish.

The Trim

It's pouring rain this Sunday afternoon so I'm catching up on the documentation instead of working on the canoe. With the hull mostly finished it is time to work on the trim. I knew what I wanted for the gunwales, but I couldn't get it done by myself in the garage so I drew up some plans, emailed them to Andy and recruited his help to get them done. I always learn a lot working with Andy as he shows me lots of woodworking tricks. He follows the mantra of spending a little extra time building a good jig will get the job done right and save time in the end.

The gunwales are made up of an inwale and an outwale on each side of the boat. A fair bit of milling was needed to shape them how I wanted. The inwale and outwale are each nominally 3/4" x 3/4", but I added a slight bevel on the side that attaches to the hull. There is a little bit of tumblehome (curving inwards) of the shear line at the middle of the boat so the bevel should help make the top of the gunwales horizontal instead of slanted. I will have to plane off the bevel towards the stems where the sides of the boat are almost vertical. We also beveled the bottom of the outwale to make it a little more elegant and lighter and rounded off the outside corners of both inwale and outwale. There are eight 6" scuppers on 12" centers on the inwale. Since I could only find 13' long ash boards we also cut scarf joints on the ends of the strips to join another 4' long piece on each. Andy constructed a sled jig for the table saw that made these joints perfectly. It can be seen in the photo with Andy. To cut the scuppers we used a router and made a jig to hold the inwale and cut four identical scuppers at a time spaced the correct distance apart. This jig was simply two flat strips of wood spaced 3/4" apart with another strip of wood that positioned the inwale in the right location when it was all screwed together. The top strip had the scupper forms cut into it for the router bit to follow. Andy also likes to make extra copies of everything so now I have three sets of gunwales! I guess I'll use the best ones for now and keep the other two for my next two boats!

Taking advantage of the workshop and the joiner I picked up a nice piece of Western Red Cedar from Minton's before heading over to Santa Cruz and brought along the extra Port Orford Cedar from making the inside stems and we cut some boards to use for making the bow and stern decks. They will have a half inch stripe of PO Cedar between two WRC halves. I will epoxy these together and shape them with the chisel and plane.

I strapped long gunwale pieces back onto the roof racks to bring them home, wrapped in plastic because of all the rain.

I also ordered the seats last week. I went for the plain straight ash seats. There are contoured ones that looked pretty nice, but I decided that someday I might make my own seats so its probably better to just get the standard ones for now - I don't want them to outshine my own handiwork! I ordered from edscanoe.com in New Hampshire. They look pretty nice on the website and they're less than half the price of Bear Mountain Boats' seats. They have a return policy so if I don't like them I can replace them. They should be here in a couple days!