Duckworks Magazine - Indian Girl

Indian Girl Update

By Richard Honan - Winthrop, Massachusetts - USA

Like pieces coming together in a puzzle, that's how our family boat building project is coming together. My grandson Christopher's, along with my brother Steve's good eye for fair curves keeps the hull looking good. A fair or a sweet curve, as I like to to call them, is a result of those long sweeping compound sweeping, well proportioned curves, when wood is bent around a form. It is something that not only boat builders strive for, but also designers of cars and airplanes.

With only three planks on each side versus nine planks on each side on the last boat we built, the planking of the hull has gone along very quickly. The use of simple home made clamps keeps the construction costs in hand.

He's a shot of my favorite brother Steve planning a bevel gain into a strake or plank.

This is a shot of the last plank being clamped in place. It won't be long an before we'll be pulling the hull off the molds.

Attaching the cutwater or false stem to the bow. The cutwater bears the brunt when a hull collides with another boat or object.

The hull is finally pulled off of the molds.

Cardboard templets are made of the bulkheads of the water tight compartments. The overall length of the hull is 12'6". With the bulkheads in place, the over all length of the cockpit is about 6'6", large enough for an adult and a grand child.

Before any trim work can be done any excess epoxy must be softened with a heat gun and scraped away. It's along and tedious job. You have to remind yourself to remove the excess epoxy squeeze out as you install each plank. Here I'm lecturing Steve about how much time it will take to remove all this crap.

Finally the bulkheads are epoxied in place and the oak rub rails are shaped and installed in place. You can't have too many clamps.

Here's Rugs, the ever faithful Cocker Spaniel, trying out the cockpit for size.

Next up is fabricating the deck beams. It is a very slow job complicated by the computing of the deck camber.

Very, V e r y , s l o o o o w

Here we're attaching the inwales, not to be confused with the outwales. It's kind of sounds like a inny belly button or an outty belly button. Outwales are actually the rub rails of the hull and the strip of wood that makes up the inwales provides additional stiffness to the hull. The small spacer blocks allow water to be drained out of the canoe when it is?tipped on it's side and if I must say, give the boat a very traditional look.

Grandson Christopher and Rugs are making believe that my stories are really funny. Rugs is giving me the look similar to my wife when she tires of my humor . . . .

Here is brother Steve painting the inside of the watertight storage compartments. Steve and I keep the conversation moving discussing boats, relatives, lobster rolls, Dave Mcdonald, the treasure on Snake Island, relatives, the Beachmont Yacht Club (worth the visit!!), boats, wives, but never politics. The discussion of politics are left to Brother Tony who was exiled to Minnesota several years ago because he couldn't stand being so close to Ted Kennedy.

Here I'm using a plywood template, along with a small router with a pilot bit to cut the circular hole for the inspection port or access hatch to the water tight compartment.

Next comes the fitting of the deck, actually two decks, one for the bow and one for the stern water tight compartments. This was a very slow process making a templet and a lot of cutting and hand planning to get an accurate fit. My Italian grandfather used to say "measure ten times and cut once . . . . . . and he was always right!

Clamping was another matter. The deck is actually bonded in place using West System Epoxy, combined with a cabosil thickening agent. I devised a Rube Goldberg series of hold down strips in conjunction to a bunch of spring clamps. A test or dry fit seemed to work very well.

After the dry fit, we applied thickened epoxy with a plastic syringe. The deck had to be structurally sound and also water tight. There are no mechanical fasteners such as screws or nails used in the fastening of the deck to the hull.