An experiment to take a light classic wooden canoe and make it with the lightest possible timber and glass � would it last or would it end up in a dumpster after a year or two? During work experience for my Engineering Course, now a long time ago, I ended up working for AdhesiveTechnologies. A 10 metre derivative of a Jim Young Rocket design.
How a timber that you can crush with your fingers can create a stiff but still light structure. A radical change for the skiffs.
Dr amatically reducing hull drag lower volume hull shape and a lightened and simplified rig. When I saw one of these at a boat show I was amazed not only by the smallness of the boat relative to its peers but just how beautiful the balsa looked.
Inspired by these developments the Australian Moth Association launched a series of very fast and very pretty balsa planked skiff Moths. This is a slightly sad photo of one of the originally very beautiful balsa skiff moths about 20 years after the fact. One of his Wood Strip Canoe Kits Square Stern Key best designs is the Wee Lassie. A single person canoe which has beautiful hollow lines in the ends and a straight keel line.
There is no small amount of controversy about what lines are the correct ones � there are several different versions. The finlike forefoot gives the boat a great grip on the water. T he result that for a short boat it has excellent directional stability.
It is unlikely to be knocked off course as the waves and wind pick up. They were planting Balsa in Northern Australia. Basically they found that the Cedar Strip Canoe Kits Minnesota University further North you went the better it would grow. I think their plantations ended up in New Guinea. I took advantage of this connection to order some pre-milled strips 7mm thick and approx 24mm wide after cusp and coving.
The greatest fun for me in boats is to put together a concept that matches construction, materials and design into a unique package. I was not particularly interested in the durability of the boat. As far as I was concerned I was going to be happy if it lasted a couple of years before being chucked into a dumpster somewhere.
So I decided to go as light as I dared with the fibreglass cloth used to sheath the balsa and fairly minimal with all the timberwork. I had a bit of good luck with materials. My intention was to do all the trim in Australian timbers. At Duck Flat there was a small piece of now rare Australian Red Cedar the right length for all the sheer reinforcements. The keelson was a sliver of Jarrah out of a floorboard � an incredibly hard hardwood with a tight curly grain.
For the spreader bar and internal stems I did use some lovely fine grain oregon Douglas Fir. In Australia we have a range of timbers that have colour and grain that are almost unbelievable to Americans and Europeans. Every timber makes a statement about colour and grain. The downside of this Woodie Wonderland is that most of our timber is hardwood of quite high density � not ideal for building lightweight boats. So thus my slip toward the Fir for the spreader bar.
The balsa was only 9ft long so had to be scarfed. As it was being sheathed glass I decided the scarfs could be quite short. I used and because of the faint grain of balsa the cut could be in the 24mm face.
There was an incredible piece of luck in joining the balsa. While I was setting up the strongback we had a fellow drop into Duck Flat who was a model builder. There were two types. O ne for gap filling and the one I was interested in for bonding of tight fitting surfaces. Planking was not straightforward. The Balsa dented badly when I nailed it in place. S o I ended up cutting strips of thin plywood to bend down and nail through them.
Generally I tend to use a single nail through each plank at each temporary bulkhead position. T he single hole to me is neater than the cluster of small holes that you get when using staples. Plus the staples had little power to hold the balsa down without tearing the strips. One nice thing about balsa is after the nail is removed you can brush the area with water. The grain swells virtually hiding the hole.
Also effective if the hull is dented accidently � for small dents anyhow. The photo below is not the balsa canoe, but one built of paulowinia. But the need to use ply pads is the same to distribute the load. Simply make a long strip, cover it with packaging tape and then cut it into pieces. Making it easy to pull out the nails later.
The pressure a nail can exert is always enough. But with staples it is sometimes required to put in several which leaves lots of little dark holes. I certainly prefer the regular holes of the nails � after all � the history of boats is the history of making holes in wood to hold the boat together.
As a glue between the planks I used Bote Cote Epoxy with white Q-cels mixed in to provide an easily sanded join. If the glue ends up a lot harder than the planking it will end up proud of the hull after sanding. I started planking at the sheer but on such a short boat the strips in the ends of the boat start swinging upwards boat upside down as planks are added.
Because it is a shorter distance from sheer to keel at the ends of the boat than in the middle. As the angle got more and more crazy I decided to cut the planks parallel with the keel and start a second run of planking. The hull sanded up very nicely by hand. Glassing went spectacularly easy � such thin cloth wets out with epoxy very easily. For second layer of glass in bottom area � no squeegee � just run a gloved hand over second glass layer.
One additional coat of epoxy rolled just as the first coat went tacky filled the weave easily. Same too for the inside of the boat. From the first boat here was a small tendency for the glass tminate from the soft balsa along the edge of the sheerline only.
There was no real way out of this for this first boat. A second boat that was sent to Japan we made the plank adjacent to the sheer out of a slightly higher density timber.
A good choice now would be Paulownia. But any timber that is a similar colour to balsa and light eg cedar, Paulownia would be a good choice. Well the balsa boat weighed in at 12lbs.
So it has taken a century to remove 6lbs. Conventional clinker lapstrake construction overlaps the planks and fits rivets through the two layers. Rushton used a method of bevelling the two planks so that there is only a total of one layer doubling of the hull in that area carrying the weight penalty of the double thickness. The fasteners were clenched through the two layers. Incredibly sophisticated and skilled construction using only the finest materials.
This construction is an interesting comparison with the Geodesic Ultralights, Featherweight boats and others that are purported to be light weight. My feeling is that most people hugely overestimate the structure required to carry paddleing boat Wood Strip Canoe Kits Square Stern Open loads.
I do have to have a quiet laugh at some of the builders that routinely cover the inside and outside of a plywood hull with fiberglass or carbon. The joins will be just as strong with glass tape. What a revelation it is paddling this boat. After the final coat of varnish had dried I carried ha it around to the municipal lake in Mt Barker for a quick paddle.
The lake is quite small, but it was amazing to feel the bow rise and fall over the tiny ripples on the water � the light weight gives a fantastic sense of lightness on the water. On larger expanses of water the boat was a dream � tracking well in adverse conditions, astoundingly easy to move along briskly. Speed is limited by the short length, but the feeling of speed Cedar Strip Canoe Kits Australia 77 from the liveliness more than makes up for it.
Effort to paddle is quite minimal. The boat has enormous directional stability because of the fineness of the ends � the narrowness of the bows provides a fin at each end of the boat see the bow-on detail picture above.
For such a small boat she is quite hard to turn, but when the conditions are not so nice and there is still a lot of ground to cover she is perfect. Over time I was able to use the canoe for picnics and camping. But use also means risk from hitting or abrading other surfaces. Most of this was avoidable by always placing the boat upside down on the ground when not in use and only placing it upright on grass or other soft surfaces.
Over time she did get a few bumps. These were easily filled with epoxy and Qcels which finished up much the same colour as the balsa.
Fairly imperceptible. The biggest learning is if such light glass is enough to protect a dentable timber like balsa then why are we using 4oz cloth on the more durable Paulownia and Cedar strip boats? Given that 90 percent of boats have relatively gentle lives and the balsa canoe did way better than just survive..
I would go for 2oz with an extra layer where there might be foot pressure inside the boat and an extra layer outside where the boat may lean on the ground. Glass is the heaviest material in strip boatbuilding and has to have the same weight of resin added but strangely most think of reducing the wood thickness � which reduces the I-beam effect very quickly. Go all out with glass, carbon and kevlar for expeditioning boats that will do surf landings onto rock shelves � but why make 90 percent heavier than they need to be?
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