Building a strip canoe is nothing new. Plenty of information is available just a search away on the web, and in several books.
When my husband, a.k.a. Mr. Hobby came home with this book a few days after Christmas, I knew that the project was no longer in the ‘just thinking about it‘ stage, he was seriously going to do this . . . now.
You may wonder why he would want to build a canoe when he could easily just buy one. Mr. Hobby has looked at several canoes and boats, but he hasn’t found one that totally meets his needs. By building his own, he can modify the plans to his own specifications.
When I say, my husband has too many hobbies, I am not joking. Being city raised as I was, he was already an avid hunter when we met in high school. I found it all to be pretty interesting. Ha, little did I know at the time where this would all lead!
As time went by, his hobbies branched out to include flint napping, arrow making, trapping, tanning hides and foraging the woods for edibles, just to name a few. Today, I am still fascinated at the things he does and I love seeing him pursue his passions.
I could fill a blog with the things Mr. Hobby does, and I seriously thought about doing just that when I began blogging (hence the name of this blog). But I digress, there’s plenty of time to fill you in on the horrors interesting life we lead. Back to the canoe . . .
A few days after the book showed up, Mr. Hobby came home with several sheets of plywood. The building was about to begin!
He cut sheets of plywood into strips and nailed the pieces together to build the base that will hold form pieces. Mr. Hobby tells me this is called the strongback. Right now the strongback resembles a ladder.
He also cut several form pieces from the plywood using templates that he drew from patterns in the book. These will be attached to the strongback and the canoe will be built around these form pieces.
The canoe will be made from western red cedar strips. This wood is not available at the local hardware store because it must be knot free. Luckily Mr. Hobby was able to find what he needed at a very reasonable price from a local lumber yard that sells speciality wood.
Then it turned bitterly cold with temperatures well below freezing. Evidently, this is not good weather for canoe building because the glue will not set properly at these temperatures. Mr. Hobby’s workshop is in the garage and it is not heated.
Being the ever resourceful guy that he his, he moved all the pieces into our basement. He will cut the strips in the workshop and bring them into the house for the actual building and gluing.
Here is the completed strongback with the form pieces attached.
Yup, there will be canoe building/assembly going on inside my house. Makes me smile, for I am a tolerant woman. Is it wrong to tout my own virtues
Hope you will join us for the next update.
Thank you!
Suet — rendered fat mixed with seeds and grains — is the highest-energy bird food available. In Australian winters and US/UK winters, suet feeders attract species (woodpeckers, treecreepers, robins) that won’t visit
Hummingbird feeders are mostly a US/Latin America thing (Australia has no native hummingbirds), but the spinebills, honeyeaters and silvereyes that visit our nectar feeders here use the same designs and the same syrup re
A bird bath is the underrated bird-attracting tool — birds need water more reliably than they need feeders, especially in hot summers. The right bath has the correct depth (shallow!), is easy to clean, and survives a w
Squirrels eat through standard bird feeders in days — chew the plastic, raid the seed, intimidate the birds. A genuinely squirrel-proof feeder uses one of three mechanisms: weight-activated closure, baffled pole, or ca
A backyard bird feeder is one of the easiest ways to add daily wonder to a garden — within weeks of setting one up you start recognising the regulars, and within a month the kids know their wattlebirds from their honey
String trimmer line is the cheapest consumable in your gardening kit — but the cheapest line snaps every five minutes, jams the auto-feed, and turns a 30-minute edge job into an hour. The right line for your trimmer ma
