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Over this past summer some friends and I decided to build a pair of 'Skin on Frame' canoes. We built the boats using an old Huron canoe as a mold to get the right lines and to steam bend frames over. The structure is entirely Douglas Fir glued and lashed together with nylon sinew, maple pegs, and copper rivets along the gunwale. We also used epoxy to screw/glue in the breast hooks. The skin is ballistic Nylon finished with 5 coats of marine varnish, the fir is oil finished. Upon completion we drove the canoes north, to embark on an 8 day tour of the Bowron lake circuit in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. The Canoes performed admirably, and exceeded our expectations!

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very impressive! There is nothing like getting back to nature then design, build, and use a a canoe. The Ballistic nylon skin looks very unique, and tougher then birch bark.
 

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Great job. Some projects are just more fun than others and this looks like it might be one of those…I loke the translucent look of the skin when the light shines thru and exposes the frame…
 

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Very impressive work!
 

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WOW. Nice job It looks great. That does look like fun.
 

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great work :)
congrat´s with the new toy´s
enjoy , enjoy , enjoy :)

Dennis
 

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Very nice. Beautiful boat.

Have you built many other boats before? Was this a challenging build? How about the total weight?
 

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I think they are wonderful. I'd like to build some for our Boy Scout Troop. Are there plans? I have some lofting frames for an ultralight canoe but with the boys being who they are they would make a mess of one in short order. Titanium frames and stainless skin, That might last a year.
 

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Those look light and beautiful, a wonderful project followed by what must a have been a very memorable
christening and use that hopefully if the first of many such voyages. I have a few hours in canoes, including
teaching/sharing boy scout usage and they are among my happier memories. Thank you for sharing this
project.
 

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EXCELANT! It is so satifying to build and use your own watercraft.
About 10 years ago I built skin on frame kayaks with my Boy Scouts. It only cost us slightly over $100 each in materials including wood, canvass, glue and paint. It was a fun project but with the boys goofing off it took way too much time. Stop by my Flickr picture site on yahoo and see what we built (and some of my other stuff too).

MIKE
 

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Sweet! Looks much lighter than my cedar strip types.
 
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