Guy
Marsden
 

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home > canoe
Building a Sassafras 14 ft. stitched lapstrake canoe

HOME laying out
the planks		 cutting
planks		 gluing
planks		 rabbeting
edges		 stitching
seams		 shaping
hull		 filleting
stems		 gluing
seams
removing
stitches		 filling
holes		 gluing
inwhales		 gluing
outwhales		 glassing
outside		 glassing inside glassing
keel		 decks and
seat mounts
installing
seats		 epoxy
coat		 sanding varnishing finishing up launching storage BILL OF
MATERIALS
 

August 2, 2007
Gluing Inwhales -- 0:45 hours

  
Yesterday I used some wood putty to fill the inside of some of the holes left by the copper wire stitches.  Then I sanded off all the residue so the inside of the hull looks clean.
Today my friend John came by to help glue in the inwhales -- he also lent me a whole bunch of clamps.  Before he arrived I had cut the whales to length and tapered the ends so they fit fairly close at the ends.  I had both pieces dry clamped into the hull before we started.  I felt that it would help with symmetry if the other side was in place as the first side was glued in.

We took one side off and did a complete dress rehearsal of the process of clamping the inwhale in place.  We worked from one end to the other.  It was clear the the trickiest part is bending the wood up to reach the stem and that is where we paid close attention to clamping strategy.  It was helpfull to have both spring clamps and C clamps.  The spring clamps to hold roughly in place ahead of the C clamps as we progressed. 

I mixed up a 3 ounce batch of epoxy and thickened it with silica to a mayonnaise consistency.  3 ounces was a good guess and was just right to coat both the whales and inner surfaces of the hull on both sides before clamping.

The clamping process went quite well with no major snags.   While John managed the loose end of the inwhale, I worked from stem to stern clamping as I went.  At the point that I had a C clamp on the mid-point, John had dropped his end of the inwhale into the stern.  It was tough to bend up at the ends, but we came pretty close to the top of the stem at each end.  I can either sand down the planks to match the inwhales, or build up epoxy to fill in the height above the top.  We'll see how it looks without the clamps tomorrow.
I deliberately decided not to try and clamp both inwhales and outwhales in the same pass as that much glue and tension just seemed like a slippery combination.  So we'll glue the outwhales on tomorrow.

Here's a movie of the gluing process, it took only 0:30:

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