Momentum

Stem post - what will become the bow.

A long weekend and some beautiful weather gave me the opportunity to really leap forward on the build.  By the end of the day today, I had the sheer stringer/gunwale bonded to one of the side panels, bevels planed on all panel edges, and had begun stitching the bottom panels together.

Stitching is a major milestone, because it's at this point that the boat stops being an entirely imaginary thing.  As you can see in the photo at right, the stitching process transforms flat panel shapes into a curved hull section.  It is now possible to squint and see the boat emerging from all of this work.

That said, I've really stitched more together here than I should have.  The stem and stern post finish work isn't complete - there's Sharpie and rough epoxy visible on the stem post photo at right - so I need to extract them, sand 'em a bit further, and lay on some more epoxy before reassembly.  I couldn't help myself, I needed to see the shape.

Center frame forces panels near-horizontal;
in distance, stem post forces panels near-vertical.
Between, ply visibly twists into the proper shape.

When you begin stitching the bottom panels together, there's nothing to keep them from lying flat, face-to-face.  That's where the frames come in.  There are two frames, one exactly amidships and another about 35" further aft.  They force the plywood to lay almost flat at those spots, and the stem- & stern-post stitching force the plywood to lay almost vertically at the ends.  In between, you get a "tortured plywood" hull shape that transitions gradually for the first 8' of the hull, and more quickly at the stern.  This produces a sharper bow and a rounder stern, which are important in handling the canoe under sail later on.

Over the next week, I'll complete the second gunwale installation, drill the side panels to mate with the bottom panels and end posts, and complete the finish work on the end posts.  Once those things are done, it will be time to complete the stitching, at which point I'll appear to have a hull.  But the stitching wire's job is just to hold the hull in shape temporarily.  That shape then gets bonded together permanently with fillets (thick seams) of thickened epoxy and fiberglass tape.

I suspect that the filleting will take a couple weeks worth of evenings and weekends, and there are the decks to install, too.  So we're not likely to have a complete hull before mid-October at the earliest.  And even then, there's the issue of coming up with the ama, outrigger poles, steering paddle, spars, completed sail, rigging.... sigh.  This canoe will almost certainly not sail this fall.  But it's conceivable that it might float as a paddling canoe before winter sets in.  That would be great motivation for the finishing touches, so that I can have a proper launching in the spring.

Even that modest goal of a spring launch is the product of a rosy outlook, but it's a rosy outlook fueled by the vision of a hullshape finally starting to emerge from my odd collection of plywood shapes, and that should keep me rolling for a while.