In the process, I stumbled across a few things I hadn’t seen in years and a few that I never noticed before.

Here are a couple of pictures of the inside construction, didn’t think to show the outside, which is rather dilapidated now…and may well collapse one of these winters.

We’re not sure when this building was built, but a rough estimate would be pre-WWII.

The boathouse sits out on stone and wooden cribs over the water. Boats were pulled in and out through the doors in the first picture and used this roller.

As a kid, I remember trying to use an old grinding wheel to sharpen a hatchet, so I went looking for it as well and found not only the hand cranked wheel, but another that has a pulley system attached to it.

These may well make their way back home to my shop if I can work out a way to actually use them….I certainly don’t need more big heavy ‘stuff’ to fill space my workshop.

To my great delight, I stumbled across a pair of old wooden wheels and an old toolbox as well that I had never noticed before. These might migrate back to my workshop as decoration on the walls someday. The system of building up the wheels is pretty intricate and clever. I may well spend some time investigating these in more depth.

The toolbox itself seems to be a very utilitarian box, but it has undergone quite a bit of wear and tear. Not the least of which probably came from the mice and squirrels that have used it as a their own person cottage/outhouse.

Hope you enjoyed these…..if anyone knows more about the wheels, I’d be really interested to know the historical details of this type of wheel. Same for the grinding wheels.

Summer hours are great, I get friday afternoons off and with my wife and daughter at home we’ve been trying to make good use of the extended weekends. I normally try to spend saturday’s doing some woodworking or home renovations, but with the nice weather we’re also trying to get out of the city and spend time up north, so it was awesome to hear my wife suggest that I go out to the workshop friday afternoon. I opened the invitation to my daughter (just turned 10) to join me and help me out with the Marble Tower project.

Typically my daughter groans at the idea of a trip to the big box hardware store or Lee Valley or much much worse, a lumber mill so I was delighted when she decided to trail out after me.

I thought about the discussions that have been going on online and decided to test them out a bit, starting with safety equipment:
Eyes: Getting eye protection on is easy enough and we even have kid sized safety goggles…but keeping them on is a challenge, they come off quickly and tend to stay off. So, this means I try to avoid any power tools.
Ears: Kids have much better hearing that us oldsters do, and the sensitivity to machine noises is obvious. Hands go to ears quickly at loud noises, so getting the big earmuff hearing protection on was easy and it was something she was willing to keep wearing as long as there was any noise. Even the drill press running was reason enough to throw them back on.
Lungs: Getting a dust mask that fits well and stays on…big challenge. This is a big problem. Even if a kid is willing to wear a paper mask or proper dust mask or respirator, they don’t fit well enough to be really effective. So, anything dusty has to be locked down with really good dust collection at the source and avoided if possible. The ambient dust extractor goes on and stays on in hopes of keeping the fine dust to a minimum.

Based on this, and the obvious fear/caution around using any power tools (though she kind of likes the drill press) I decided to focus on how to introduce hand tools into the equation.

I’m personally fearful of shoving a nice sharp chisel (or worse yet a dull rusty one) into the palm of my hand, and I was equally concerned that a child would do this much more easily. I decided to try out a block plane. I didn’t see too much risk in using this and to my surprise, she picked it up remarkably fast. After a few swipes across an old strip of cedar, she actually reached for my old jack plane and with a gleam in her eye, she set to work making bigger shavings. She attacked the board with gusto making long thin shavings and building up a pile on the workbench.

Here’s what that ended up looking like: video link
After a few minutes of this she had removed close to 3/4″ of material and made a rather large pile of shavings, which of course we have to save to use as tinder for the campfire on camping trips.

I never really expected my daughter to get that into woodworking, but I can see the spark of interest and think I will have to fan the flames a little and see where it gets us.

Epilogue: Since this happened, we’ve had a couple of trips to the workshop where my daughter has helped out with tidying, sorting, cleaning and once the bench was to her satisfaction, back to more planing. We’ve even ventured to try using a carving gouge (two handed approach only to keep things in tact). An added benefit of this is that as I am explaining the safest way of doing something and the ‘correct’ way to hold a tool, I’m realizing that over time I have allowed myself to get sloppy with my own safety, so we’re both learning.

While visiting a heritage site called Ministers Island in New Brunswick, we explored the buildings on this site (the summer cottage of Sir William Van Horne, engineer behind building the railroad across Canada).

The buildings on the site were built around 1892, though the original settlement on the island was about 100 years earlier by an Anglican priest (thus the name).

Ok…enough history lessons.

The thing that really intrigued me was when we went into the barn…which is impressive in size alone, but even moreso because of the way it was constructed.

The only skilled workers available in the area at the time were boatbuilders, so this is who Van Horne commissioned to construct the buildings. The result is that the truss architecture in the barn is very unusual and if you know what to look for, you will see dramatic similarities between the truss structure of the roof and the construction of a large turn of the century ship. The boatbuilders knew little of building construction, so they relied on their knowledge of boatbuilding to frame up the barn.

Here are a couple of pictures….they don’t do it justice, but it’s unusual to look at and impressive to see in person. Certainly not something you’ll find in your local subdivision. :-)

Here’s where we stand today on the project:

The first step was to build the base and attach the side rails to it that go up to where the cross bracing and the handle reside. This wasn’t too bad to do…but it was the first time that I ran into the concept of cutting compound angles…which I learned requires patience rather than skill. I sometimes lack both…but I got through it.

Next was the starter mechanism. This is very cool…and equally frustrating. I haven’t got this working 100% yet and will likely wait until the very end to complete it. The marbles line up in the top and you prime the system with one marble after the mechanism. The lower bar tilts up and down allowing the next marble to pop through the mechanism and start down the rails….and so on until they’re all running. When it works reliably I’ll try and shoot a short video.

From above:

Next up was the circular run around the rails before dropping into the xylophone. This was a major pain the butt. Again, compound angles and short patience conspired against me. :-) You need to compensate for a 5 degree angle against the outside rail, plus the 60 degrees to join around the hexagon, plus a 5-10 degree drop in elevation to keep the marble moving. Let’s just say there are more than a couple of mis-cuts still taunting me on my bench.

Next up was the xylophone. Now we’re having fun. This was a fun little piece to build and it makes noise!!! The one gotcha I encountered was trying to paint the keys. I thought it would be nice to paint them bright colours. I tried priming them and using some enamel paints, but this was not giving me the look I was expecting. In the end, I removed the paint and buffed them up a bit to leave them as unadorned metal.

After the xylophone the marbles are supposed to shoot into a little cyclone type thing. The plans called for building a support bar (see the original post and you’ll see the picture) and using laminated strips of thin plywood cut in a spiral and glued/screwed down onto the support bar. I didn’t want to do it this way. So, to challenge myself, I decided to try laminating together a large segmented bowl that would act like a funnel that the marbles can spin around and drop out the bottom.

I have never tried segmented turning before, so this was much more challenging for me than I expected. I turned it this week and it works fairly well. I’ve got a few joints that aren’t as clean as I’d like and the center at the bottom has some small segments that blew out while I was turning it. I’ll keep working on cleaning it up until I’m happy with it and I’ll also be creating my own mounting mechanism.

The funnel bowl:

Here’s approximately where it’s going to sit….after I figure out how to mount it and put a transition rail from the xylophone on to the funnel.

I saw these plans years ago in a Lee Valley flyer and went out and bought them along with the kit that supplies the ball bearings (marbles), xylophone keys and bell. Here’s the picture from the catalog since the plans themselves don’t have any photographs of the finished product (strike one against the plans themselves).

I have since seen this a couple of times on the web and some enterprising person created charity gumball machines on a larger scale that do more or less the same thing with a gumball.

Here’s what you get in the plans….three green double sized, double sided, sheets of paper with ”measured drawrings” and long winded instructions.

To Lee Valley’s credit, they included an “errata” sheet with recommendations for altering the instructions to reduce ambiguity. This was certainly helpful, but clearly shows that the plans themselves were challenged to begin with.

Plan Review: Ok, now that I’ve griped a bit about the plans, I’ll sum up my review of them. I have purchased plans before and had mixed results. This is on the bottom end in terms of user friendliness as far as plans go. They’ve tried to minimize the paper used, but done so at the expense of the person using them. In general I would not repeat this process with these plans…I would likely draw up my own next time.

I have been working on this ‘on and off’ for quite some time….but I’m dedicated to wrapping it up now, so I’ll post my progress as I get each stage done.

Finally sucked it up and just took some pictures of the workshop. It’s a mess….I know, it’s in transition and I figure I’ll post some updated pictures when I’m further along with the cleanup/reorganization.

I’ve been juggling trying to get some things fixed up in the workshop, try to get some woodworking done and try and get some home renovations done. So far, the renovations are winning…but I’m fighting back.

This workshop has evolved a lot over the years. It started as a Black and Decker workmate bench and a jigsaw. As my wife will attest to, the workshop seems to keep expanding (like the universe, or my waist…depending on who you ask). I’ve got it to a workable state now and also have lumber storage in a rack outside the workshop (within the garage) that is hiding behind a pile of home renovation materials. Once that work gets done, I’ll be able to clean up the rack and include a picture. If I took the picture today it would look a lot like a big box aisle…drywall, toilet, tub, doors….just have to remember that I did this to myself.

I’m totally open to comments, criticisms and suggestions. I think half the fun of woodworking is building the workshop and buying the tools that fill it….so I might as well celebrate that I’ve still got play time to get it the way I want it.

Just as it is all looking like it’s “this” close to being done, we get to revisit our friend the random orbit sander! I had thought that sanding the hull was a lot of work…but sanding the epoxy was an entirely different experience. Not only is the epoxy that much harder, but you can’t go too hard at it or you’ll get through the epoxy to the fiberglass. Once you hit fiberglass you end up with ugly white crosshatching that won’t go away. Ok, so I had just a little bit of it on the outside of the stern….caught it in time that you only see it in certain light, but it’s there!

With the sanding done…the magic really starts to happen. The epoxy gave us a really good look at what it was going to be like when it was finished…but doing that sanding and throwing on a coat of spar varnish just blew me away.

The decks and handles just popped with the varnish.

But the real test was the outside of the hull. There’s something inherently artistic in the look of a glossy canoe flipped upside down. For me, this was the ultimate reward in the entire project. Even more than the maiden voyage, seeing what this canoe looked like with it’s final finish on it just took my breath away.

There is that sweet spot when the varnish first goes on and is still wet where everything looks like it’s shrouded in glass. I think I stood there and looked at it with sticky varnishy hands for a good 20 minutes. Of course….the fumes from the spar varnish might just have had something to do with that.

To be honest, all these years later, I don’t recall how many coats of varnish we put on it. I think it was 3, but may have been 4 with successively lighter sanding between coats. I have heard that you have to be careful about not doing too many coats or as the varnish weathers it will delaminate and come off in big flakes.

The only things we had left were to mount the yoke, seats and stem covers. I was impatient at this point and chose to buy the premade yoke/seats (in cherry). Someday I may make my own…but for now they work fine and look good.

The stem covers are strips of brass to protect the stems from bumps and dings. These were bent around the stems and up onto the decks. We secured them with brass screws. Note to anyone doing this….get some steel screws the same size as the brass and install them first so that the brass screws don’t get stripped off and break. Once it’s all in place, replace each steel screw with a brass one very carefully. Putting a drop of epoxy into the screw holes also adds a bit of extra protection.

Here it is at home. My wife and daughter were very excited and even decorated the house with streamers and had mock champagne. We Christened her ‘Hope it Floats’....and thus far, it does!

Shortly after we took her up to a lake and here is the maiden voyage, across the lake and back.

Thanks for following along…it was a great project, very satisfying and something we can keep enjoying for years to come.

First up, we have to install the inwales. In order to allow water to pour out of the canoe easily, you need to install the inwales with a space between them and the hull. The spacers are called scuppers. I love nautical terminology….you call that a what???

I wanted a contrast, but not so much that it took away from the cedar. I found that a strip of mahogany that I had kicking around would be just slightly darker than the darkest parts of the cedar so I used this in making some of the accents. This also nicely contrasted with the ash gunwales and maple I was using in other parts.

We had to mark out and predrill all the holes from the outside in to attach the scuppers and the inwales with screws. The screws would later be hidden by the outwales. The scuppers also got a bit of glue to seal up their edges. On the bow/stern ends, the final scupper was a long tapered strip that brought the inwales to a point in the bow/stern.

I had the option of using some stock cherry decks, but I really wanted to add some personality to it, so I fabricated the decks out of maple and mahogany.

Once these were in place, I added some accent pieces to the inner edge as well as adding maple carrying handles in both ends.

The outwales were next to go on and were screwed through the hull into the inwales to secure everything in place. In order to get this right there was a bit of fiddling around that had to go on when we sized the inwales and outwales. The hull was ultra flexible at the time, so we had to get the yoke in place and temporarily clamp it in place when we fit the inwales, but once they were in place we put the yoke in it’s proper place with brass carriage bolts through the inwales, stabilizing the hull for the placement of the outwales.

To plug up the screw holes from the outwales being attached I made up some mahogany plugs and glued them in place, giving the final bit of accenting…hopefully not too overboard. (Pun intended)

Next up, the final finishing and maiden voyage!

Before we can get to the inside, we’ve got to get the canoe off the form. The form was built such that a few station blocks at one end could be easily removed from the form and the canoe slipped back off the form quite easily.

I was unprepared for just how springy and loose the whole thing was once it came off the form. This thing can bounce! In fact, to demonstrate how strong and flexible this type of construction is, someone at one point made up a curved panel and epoxy/fiberglassed it together. They would put it cup-side down and jump on and off of it….and it apparently bounced back with little or not damage. I never saw this myself, but I can see it…to a point.

Hey…that almost looks like a canoe!

And here’s the inside with the woodfiller spots.

Once again we had a very very long day of sanding to get the inside of the hull nice and smooth. The inside was much harder to do than the outside since the curves were concave, adding the risk of cutting in with the sander. Up in the bow and stern ends it became a labour of love to do the sanding by hand. Especially around the inside stem bands.

Here’s the nice shiny sheet of fiberglass draped into the interior.

And once again, the same process of pouring in the epoxy and spreading it out evenly.

Once this had dried, we could trim off the excess.

In actuality, I’m thinking….wait for it…...wait for it…....

“If you can get stuff and put them up tonight I can have that room cleaned up before the weekend.”

....thud, the other shoe drops.

I find it hard to juggle the balance between getting things done quickly with getting things done right (right in my mind anyway). Sure I can stop at Ikea or Home Depot on the way home, grab some cheap melamine shelves that will go with the cheap melamine desks in the office, put them up and be done with it. After all, we’re going to redo the room in a few months anyway….uh oh, now I’m rationalizing it too.

But isn’t the point of being a woodworker (especially as a hobbyist) the ability to MAKE things like this? Of course, I recognize that budgeting time to do the work and having to wait for finishes to dry and glue to dry will mean that the project will take more than a couple of hours.

I blame our societal need to have things ‘now’ instead of having the patience to think the purchase through, wait for something better to be built by hand and cherish the result for years to come.

On that note, since I’ll be at Home Depot anyway maybe I’ll do some impulse shopping for a dovetail jig or maybe one of those newfangled router tables made from melamine.

The hull as it stands is pretty rough, there’s a lot of squeeze-out of the poly-glue that we used on the strips, rough edges to the strips, slight tearout around the areas where the staples were. I have to confess, I don’t look forward to the sanding process for any project, but once resolved to the idea, I find it a calming zen-like process.

The sanding was done with rather large random orbit sanders. Rather large, rather noisy and rather heavy. My zen-like state of sanding was rudely interrupted (insert sounds of a record needle scraping across an LP) by the numbness traveling up my arms from the vibration of the sander. Ok, so I’m whining a bit, it wasn’t all that bad, but it was by far the most arduous task in the project. Getting the hull all sanded down to a smooth consistent state took quite a while, and included burning out one the sander motors.

As is usually the case, once the gruntwork is done, you feel satisified with the end result.

With all the glue and gunk removed, you can start to see what the canoe’s character is going to be. Very satisfying stuff.

The last step before the canoe comes off the form is the fiberglassing. This was something I had zero experience with and was more than a little nervous about screwing up the work done so far.

The process was surprisingly easy. Clean the surface of all the dust, wipe it down and very gently roll out and lay the sheet of velvety fiberglass material evenly over the canoe. When you see the canoe draped in what looks like a nice shiny white satin cloth a lot of questions come up about how it’s going to look when it’s done.

With the fiberglass in place, we mixed up tubs of epoxy resin and set to work. This was the part I was most concerned about, I had visions of big wrinkles and a resulting ugly mess on my beautiful wood. My fears were unfounded. Pouring the resin onto the keel line and using plastic spatulas, we worked the epoxy into the fiberglass, making sure not to stretch or wrinkle it. This was much easier than I thought. The resin is quite thin, kind of like a runny syrup, so it goes on pretty easily and spreads well. It took a fair bit of time to get the whole hull done, but the satisfaction was huge!

It was a big boost to see the wood as it’s going to appear when it’s all done. The epoxy darkened the wood to its final colour and while it was wet, gave it a luster and shine that was pretty spectacular when you compare it to the before picture. Here’s the same view as the last picture, but with the epoxying done.

A couple more pictures of how the hull looks with the fiberglass/epoxy in place. I really was quite surprised at how clear the fiberglass became with the epoxy soaked into it. Great stuff.

Next up…do the whole process again on the inside of the hull.

I out last episode, we had finished up the one side and now we’ll close it all up.

Before we close up the other side, we’ve got to trim down the first side to get a nice clean line to work with. Nothing too scientific here, for the most part we eye-balled the parts around the stems and laid a strip down the keel-line to mark off the center. Getting the keel-line straight isn’t necessary yet, since we’ll be fine tuning it later on.

With the one side cleaned up, we repeat the process on the other side and work in towards the keel. The difficult part here was as we got down the bottom of the hull, where we had to trim pieces to fit properly. This involved a lot of clamping, cursing and trial and error as we didn’t want to cut them too short or at the wrong angle.

This was about the time when I felt a bit of panic. The keel doesn’t line up nicely and there are literally hundreds of holes in my boat…mostly from the staples. I did not feel confident that this was going to float that well….maybe make a nice sprinkler system if I string it up over the veggie patch…

The keel area looked pretty rough with the loosely joined edges.

All was not lost….we then cut a strip for the keel-line and tacked it in place to mark the area that it would go. We marked it, removed the strip and cut out the excess wood very very slowly and carefully. This part we wanted a good fit for.

It looks a bit loose in the picture, but it’s actually quite a tight fit.

The last step in the hull construction was the clean up the stems and put the outer stems in place. Cleaning up the stems with spokeshaves and planes was pretty timeconsuming, but in the end it turned out to be pretty good.

We attached the previously bent stems and glued and screwed them in place.

Lastly, we cut off the screw heads, cleaned them up and epoxied over the ends.

In our next episode things get very very very dusty….

Given what I’ve been working with for so long, I can see why people pay the money for a big heavy table saw. I turned it on and it just hummed…what a beautiful sound. AND…I could still hear the radio!!! I can even imaging continuing a conversation with this thing running.

This coupled with moving my dust collection outside the workshop is going to huge for keeping the noise down.

I only had time for one quick cut…but it was nice and smooth, no effort what-so-ever. I can’t wait to start cutting something for a project.

Before I get too excited, I’ve got to get the saw in it’s semi-permanent position up against the workbench.

This saw is quite a bit bigger than my old saw and will require me eating into my bench space a little. I’ll get some workshop pics uploaded after I get the new saw in and the workshop cleaned up. I’ve been stuck with the remodeling bug in the workshop for a little while and haven’t quite got everything sorted out. That and I’ve got a couple of projects on the go…plus my buddy who does woodworking with me also has some bits and pieces in the shop at the moment.

For anyone with one of these smaller saw, I highly recommend the setup I have in these pictures, it was very useful for me have the extended table on the left and the big outfeed bench behind it. The dust collection underneath it was nice too, I used it as a separator with my shopvac and later updated it for a 4” hose to the dust collector.

Here’s the old saw in it’s place, with the recycling bin dust collection box under it.

Out with the old…..

....and I’ve got some work to do before I can say ‘in with the new’....but here’s the new saw anyway:

Of course, it helped that there was a sale this weekend…perfect timing.

Given I’m not unnaturally gorilla-like, I opted to have HD deliver the 450lb package.

The saw arrived today…what a marvel of packaging this thing is…whoever figured out how to package this saw up should make puzzles too…the box could not realistically be any more efficiently packed.

So far, I’ve only managed to open it up and remove the obvious loose parts and give the granite top and wings a once over to make sure everything looks ok.

Since I’m juggling a few things at the moment, I’ll be stretching out the assembly of the saw over a few days or so. Stay tuned for the first cut!

I was extremely impressed with the fact that there are people out there (here?) who actually photo-document the entire process of unpacking, organizing and assembling this saw. I at least know that I won’t have to struggle too long if I run into any problems…the LJ helpdesk is always here. :-)

This is a point where having extra hands was quite valuable. You really need to flex the strips quite a bit to bend them onto the form as they work around the curved part of the hull. At one point, the each strip is essentially flat (horizontal) on the bottom of the hull, but as it curves around to the bow/stern, they end up vertical against the stems. The strips are flexible enough to do this with a little convincing, but we found it easiest to work from the middle out in both directions at the same time, one person working towards the bow and one towards the stern.

Another design element: An option that I have seen on some canoes, was to keep going with the planking up one side and wrap the strips across the keel-line and around the other side. This creates an interesting visual detail as the canoe becomes asymetrical.
A second option is to get the point in the pictures above and fill in ‘the football’ (the football shaped gap that remains) in different ways. Switch from the continual curved strips, to a transition where the football is made of strips running parallel to the keel, more like a strip floor than a curved hull.

I went with a more traditional approach, to continue to fill in the football with curved strips one side at a time. You do get some challenges with the curvature that has to happen in the strips, but a few clamps, staples and patience will get you to the point where one side of the hull is filled in.

We also had to glue in some shorter strips from our original first strip, going down the form, to give the bow and stern their upward curve. These have to be a fair bit longer than you think, since the curve of the gunwales from bow to stern is fairly shallow.

Next, closing up the hull completely.

The forming of the hull is done on a strongback, which is basically a long rigid beam with panels rising from it that look like cross sections of the hull. I didn’t take pictures at this stage, but you will see what these look like in the first few pictures.

If you were starting from scratch, you would need to build these forms and attach them to the strongback according to whatever set of plans you work from. Many plan kits come with full scale plans for the forms (also called aligning stations). I was able to skip this step as Dave already had a prepared form that I could use.

The first part of the canoe to be attached to the form are the stems. These are the curved wooden strips that form the bow and stern. These are critical to get right as this is what the hull strips are attached to. The stems I used are steambent ash, roughly 7/8″ square. These get bent and clamped onto the form and once they hold their shape, the profile of the stem is shaped to accept the cedar strips by putting a slight bevel on them.

Now that the stems are in place (held onto the form with clamps and tape, which get removed as you add strips) we get to the fun part, adding the strips. Yes, we took full advantage of the opportunity to make light of the fact that we were ’stripping’ for fun after work.

We start with the first full strip extending from bow to stern. Using reference marks on the forms the first strip is stapled on to the form and glued to the stems at the bow and stern. This takes a bit of finessing as they are supposed to curve around the form and getting them right on the reference line is important.

From here, the work goes quite quickly. We ran a bead of polyurethane glue into the cove (which faces upwards on the form) and placed a new strip flush into the cove, stapling it to each of the aligning stations and gluing and clamping them to the stems, allowing them to overhang the stems slightly.

Design alternative: This is a good place to point out that this canoe has no ribs, some other designs would have ribs stretched over the aligning stations and each strip would be tacked onto the ribs with brass tacks. While this adds rigidity (and weight) the later addition of fiberglass and epoxy to the interior and exterior provides enough support to allow the omission of the ribs.

One of the fun aspects of this stage is sifting through the pile of cedar strips to pick out matching or complementing colours and trying to establish some sort of symmetry in the way these strips appear on both sides of the canoe. After the first few strips went in, we put an accent strip made of basswood that makes a nice very light line down the side of the canoe. Not quite racing stripes, but close!

The progress on this first session was pretty dramatic. I think we left thinking that we’d be done in a couple of weeks. That misconception was corrected a couple of weeks later.

Ian

I decided several years ago that I wanted to get more serious about woodworking and to try something that I perceived as out of my league. The idea for the canoe was one that had bounced around in my head for a while. I finally chose to make the leap after seeing a magazine article showing someone in the Toronto area who had a large workshop where he built boats and taught people the art/skill of small boatbuilding.

After doing some research, I found that this was not a unique thing. I found another, smaller, workshop closer to my home run by a guy named Dave Fisher. I went out to his shop one night, looked at the canoes and kayaks being built and was hooked. I signed up for his next opening.

The project began early in 2004 and was completed over several months, working an average 3-4 hours per week. Dave was an excellent teacher (his regular vocation as it turns out) and with the help of my friend Adam, each week gave a great sense of accomplishment as we saw the project grow from a pile of cedar strips into a beautiful canoe.

This is the final product, ready for her maiden voyage.

My lovely wife suggested that we needed to name her and brimming with confidence, we christened her ‘Hope it Floats’.

It does float…rather well in fact!

More to come in the days ahead, I’ll take things back to day one.