1928 Old Town "HW" 16'

[dogbrain]

Continuing to make progress here. I got carried away and made 165 linear feet of planking today. I didn't realize I had squirreled away so much of the quarter sawn WRC, but I went ahead and cut it all into planking. I was able to get 3 planks from each 7/8" board and 5 planks from one 2x I had. I used a band saw to resaw the boards to a little less than 1/4", then used the planer to get them down to 5/32". My planer goes down to a minimum of 1/8" and does 5/32" with no problem at all. A couple of the boards on top don't have great color for this boat, but I think I can hide those under the gunwale.

I also ripped 4 more strips of the sitka spruce for outwales. I'll scarf these together in the next few days. I sanded down the good inwale and still can't believe what good condition it's in. The new sitka spruce turns out to be a perfect match to the 89 year old white spruce.




I also installed 6 ribs in the last week. I stopped there since I really need to get the replacement inwale installed before I go any further. I did get the rest of the ribs (11 more) all sized and shaped and ready for bending. All the rib tips are shaped and sanded and ready to be nailed to the inwale.




I did a practice fit with the inwale that has one end already steamed and it fits really well. I was surprised how well the sitka spruce bends. I soaked it for 5 days and steamed for an hour. Hardly any resistance bending it on the form. I can't wait to get that thing installed. On these old towns there's a bit of fiddly tapering and beveling on the inwale tips that will probably take me an additional couple hours before I can nail it on.




And finally, I did a little bit of deck repair by scarfing on new tips. I matched the grain of the ash pretty well, but I'll need to work on the color at some point.



The new inwale will be installed next week after the wood has a chance to set for week, then it will be full on rib replacement after that.

Mark

 

[Robin]

Nice job on the rib tips, and the inwales, and the ribs too. Can't wait to see the new inwales in, what a difference they make to the canoe, like a new beginning. Those decks look great very nice work.

 

[dogbrain]

Success! the new inwale is installed. I was really nervous about this part of the restoration. Mostly worried that I would somehow loose the shape of the canoe and have a different shape on one side, or that I would trash the inwale getting the bend wrong. Neither happened. The other thing that worried me was getting the decks to fit the weird taper on the inwale. I used a hand plane to take off the bevel on the outside, then tapered the inwale on the outside until it matched the other side.

It was really satisfying to hammer those ring nails through all the new ribs and rib tips.





I pulled the ends together with clamps, and screwed on the decks which really brought the whole boat together. I finally got around to cleaning up the other inwale which is in surprisingly good shape, especially given the condition of the one I replaced. It needs new tips though. Like I said in an earlier post, the old inwale was made of an inferior wood species, really soft, possibly fir. When they installed the old inwale it had broken at the steep upturn on both ends, but they went ahead and put the boat back together anyway. Very strange.






It looks like I'll need to start over with the stem tip repairs. I missed the mark on the curve of the stem on both ends. I'm glad I didn't glue those on yet, although with this type of project I've slowly come to the realization that anything can be re-done. Just cut it off and give it another shot.

I'm really looking forward to bending and installing the remaining ribs and nailing in all that planking I made last week, but it's getting to be full-on canoe season, so in the next couple weeks I'll be heading out on a few trips and this project will be on hold until I return in late September.

Mark

 

[SaganagaJoe]

Any progress?

 

[dogbrain]

Thanks for asking Joe. I have made a bit of progress. The pictures tell most of the story. I didn't get back to working on this old canoe until sometime in late October. Since then I bent and installed a number of new ribs but reached a point where I had to start replacing some of the planking in order to bend more of them. Even though this canoe had 17 broken ribs, or so I thought, there were 4 next to each other in the center that were badly split and had distorted the hull a bit.



I soaked some more ribs and ended up breaking a couple because I didn't soak them long enough. I'm really good at re-learning lessons like this.



I've had most trouble with breaking the quarter sawn rib stock. I have yet to break a flat sawn rib.

I had a couple of the new ribs next to each other in the center that were a bit out of alignment with the rest. If I had just gone forward I would have ended up with a bit of a bulge in that area. It was a little unorthodox, but I detached the two ribs from one inwale and removed all the tacks and went ahead and installed all the new planking on the bottom. My thought was that the planking would bridge the space and I could go back and tack down the ribs in the correct alignment. This all worked great and the bottom of the canoe is fair through this area now.



This is when I found another cracked rib, number 18. At first I thought my eyes were playing games since I had looked at all these ribs dozens of times over the last year, but there it was. I was inclined to ignore it, but I'll replace that one too. I wanted to avoid cutting into my last big chunk of white cedar.

So, after I tacked in what I thought were the last 2 ribs this is what it looks like now. There's that last rib that needs to be replaced, just to the left of center in the middle of all those new ribs. There will only be 3 original ribs in that span of 18 ribs. Can you pick out the western red cedar rib?







Lots of 2 steps forward one step back during this time. I pulled most of the tacks out of a couple ribs that were a little twisted to fair up an area close to one end, and I even pulled all the tacks out of one rib before I realized it was the wrong rib. That was right after I had snapped 2 ribs while bending them. A little while later I broke an inwale from another canoe when trying to move it out of the way. Bad day.

Lots of wood replaced in this canoe. By the time I'm done I'll be in for at least half the planking, close to half the ribs, especially if you include almost all the rib tips, one inwale, two outwales, inwale tips, deck tips, stem tips............. That's probably 50% a new canoe, or more than 50% if you include the canvas, filler, paint and varnish.

My winter season starts next week, so work on the canoe will again be sporadic. I plan to get the rest of the wood work done, varnish the inside and the canvas put on this winter ready for the filler when things warm up in the spring. I hope to have it on the water early this summer for its 90th birthday.

Mark

 

[Iskweo]

Everybody needs one boat like this one. You are doing a fine job and it will be a real joy paddling it once finished. Great job.

Christine

 

[Odyssey]

Nice work Mark. Thanks to you this Old Town will see it's 90th next summer. The birthday paddle would make an extraordinary trip report.

 

[lowangle al]

Nice work Dogbrain. I wonder how many w/c boats are in use today compared to 10 or 20 years ago because of guys like you.

 

[Will Derness]

Lots of wood replaced in this canoe. By the time I'm done I'll be in for at least half the planking, close to half the ribs, especially if you include almost all the rib tips, one inwale, two outwales, inwale tips, deck tips, stem tips............. That's probably 50% a new canoe, or more than 50% if you include the canvas, filler, paint and varnish.

A 21st century example of the philosophical question raised by the ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's paradox. It is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

If replacing everything changes its identity, at what point in the restoration did it lose it lose its identity? If one could establish such a point, you must be close to it.

Great work and dedication to bring this canoe back to life!

 

[Jatfomike]

Great job Dogbrain! Thanks for sharing all of the resto photos! Looking forward to following this thru the Winter.

Mike

 

[dogbrain]

Thanks, and good point Will. I think they say that all the cells in our body regenerate every 7 years too. I think this and many canoes like this would have had most of those same ribs replaced at one point or another through the life of the boat instead of in one shot like I'm doing here. I think this boat was used hard at the summer camp and probably maintained at some minimum level in its first few decades but not after that. Certainly after it got its fiberglass skin over 50 years ago in 1965 the maintenance of the hull ceased. By the way, I forgot to add seats to the list above. The front seat is missing and only the 2 transverse pieces of the rear seat are original.

I had this GMC truck that had the engine, transmission, rear end, transfer case, most of the front end components and a couple of the body panels replaced in the years I had it. Every time I picked it up from one of these repairs I knew right away that it was the same old piece of crap truck.

Mark

 

[Odyssey]

Ha ha! Good one Mark. I'll have to remember that one. I'm enjoying this rebuild btw. And Will brings up a good and amusing (to me anyway) point about providence and "materials mortality". Most everything that ever was organic will break down to their elemental beginnings some day. (Without our help to preserve them.) It's sad to say goodbye to a whole, or a part of a cherished item, but goodbyes are gonna happen someday. Unless you hang it in a museum neatly preserved/conserved. That's not a bad thing either. IMO as much as these canoes are cherished as history, history is still moving on with time. Why shouldn't historical items being used also move on to further reincarnations rather than being mummified? But that decision is a personal one. I'm not arguing anything, just pondering and typing at the same time. (Not a good thing for me, although both are equally slow.)
Anyway, I have to go out for awhile. I have some snow to clear; with a shovel that I've repaired so many times...you've heard this story before.

 

[dogbrain]

I agree with everything you say Odyssey, this canoe was close to being a total loss, but now it will be used again and possibly used hard by me. I think it has a better chance to survive the next 90 years than the last. I still have the pile of all the planking I pulled off the canoe laying on the floor and I can't quite get myself to bust it all up and toss it in the trash. The ribs were easy to toss since they came out in small pieces. I think I'll bring that pile of plank on the first paddle and burn it on the beach. Carbon into the atmosphere, carbon stored in tree, tree turned into canoe. The cycle is complete.

Mark

 

[dogbrain]

I made some minor progress on the old canoe in the last month. I finally got around to making and installing the final, 18th rib. I attempted to make a rib out of some offcut slabs of white cedar to no avail. Every time I'd make a cut there would be a knot or some other imperfection in the wrong place. I finally sliced into the nice clear 8 foot 4 x 6 I had been saving for who knows what. All this took me a good half a day since my tools are put away and each one has to be dragged out, set up, and put back away. Rip on the bandsaw, run through the planer, run through the table saw, taper on the bandsaw and finish with a plane and spokeshave, sand. If you add in the time it took to set up and steam bend the rib, rip out the old rib and install the new you're looking at the better part of a whole day just to replace a single rib. No complaints though.



After replacing the rib I moved on to tearing out the remaining bad planking and filling in the rest of the bottom. There is one strip where I wish I had just replaced a long section of planking instead of piecing it together, but I changed my mind on a section of planking and I had already nailed in the shorter piece. I am proud to say that the bottom is nice and fair with no lumps though. I was worried since the center of the boat was quite busted up and mis-shapen. And that's where it sits. Work and full weekends coming up mean the canoe will sit again for a while.

Next step is to button up the stems and start filling in the sheer planking. Thanks for tuning in. Mark

 

[Iskweo]

That looks good. The new planking often gets rid of some ripples on neglected old boats. That one will be back in the water before you know it.

Christy

 

[Robin]

Nice job on the planking, looks good

 

[DeniseO30]

I made some minor progress on the old canoe in the last month. I finally got around to making and installing the final, 18th rib. I attempted to make a rib out of some offcut slabs of white cedar to no avail. Every time I'd make a cut there would be a knot or some other imperfection in the wrong place. I finally sliced into the nice clear 8 foot 4 x 6 I had been saving for who knows what. All this took me a good half a day since my tools are put away and each one has to be dragged out, set up, and put back away. Rip on the bandsaw, run through the planer, run through the table saw, taper on the bandsaw and finish with a plane and spokeshave, sand. If you add in the time it took to set up and steam bend the rib, rip out the old rib and install the new you're looking at the better part of a whole day just to replace a single rib. No complaints though.



After replacing the rib I moved on to tearing out the remaining bad planking and filling in the rest of the bottom. There is one strip where I wish I had just replaced a long section of planking instead of piecing it together, but I changed my mind on a section of planking and I had already nailed in the shorter piece. I am proud to say that the bottom is nice and fair with no lumps though. I was worried since the center of the boat was quite busted up and mis-shapen. And that's where it sits. Work and full weekends coming up mean the canoe will sit again for a while.

Next step is to button up the stems and start filling in the sheer planking. Thanks for tuning in. Mark

Nice, I'm new on this site, not new to boat building I just don't know if I would even bother removing glass from an old boat when there so many others without glass on them, but good on you you saved another!
1955 18' Old Town HW restored about 12 years ago one and was completely gone it looked like a shark bite LOL
Most of my photographs have been lost thanks to Photobucket.

 

[dogbrain]

Welcome to Canoetripping. Availability of these old boats really depends on where you live. Back east you probably see them all the time, but here in the Rocky Mountain west you'll rarely if ever see a wood/canvas canoe. This particular boat is the only one I've ever seen for sale here. Removing the fiberglass turned out to be one of the easier parts of the restoration so far.

Mark

 

[DaveOR]

I have been reading your posts on Wooden Boat Forums for some time, Denise. Welcome and looking forward to your contributions to this forum.

I agree with you, Mark. I live in western Oregon and have been looking for a for a wood/canvas or stripper square-stern or freighter to buy or restore for a couple of years. I saw one on Craigslist a couple of years ago and it was quickly gone. That's been it. Same for regular w/c boats, although I have managed to find a couple of these.

Looking at CL in New England and eastern Canada, however, it's just the opposite. My problem there would be settling on one!

Dave

 

[DeniseO30]

I have been reading your posts on Wooden Boat Forums for some time, Denise. Welcome and looking forward to your contributions to this forum.

I agree with you, Mark. I live in western Oregon and have been looking for a for a wood/canvas or stripper square-stern or freighter to buy or restore for a couple of years. I saw one on Craigslist a couple of years ago and it was quickly gone. That's been it. Same for regular w/c boats, although I have managed to find a couple of these.

Looking at CL in New England and eastern Canada, however, it's just the opposite. My problem there would be settling on one!

Dave

Hi Dave! Thank you! Building a form is not out of the question it's just a matter of building a strip canoe with metal bands for the ribs it is very time consuming but building a boat or a canoe is also very time consuming!

Maybe I'm a bit Daft in my old age But after giving up on so many other things in life, the love of Woodworking, boats and boat building continues to keep my interest.