Thread: What I did last week - quick build quick canoe?

Well, I had big plans ... but in the end I just couldn't compete with Rick or Clinton1 with their fast builds of the Quick Canoe.



My intention was to do a trial for the Loire trip next year to see just how quickly i could put a Quick Canoe together nonstop.

In the end I was defeated by winter.

The decisions I made were

• Cheap marine ply - I looked for some good exterior at local shops but all the exterior was REALLY crappy. So went for the cheapest marine ply i could find. It was Pacific Maple, which is very stiff so I reduced the thickness from 6mm to 4mm.
• Used polyester resin - so I could potentially do the glass taping inside and out in one day. This worked perfectly even though I turned the boat over early and had to put a heater under it to kick off the resin after taping the inside. Apparently there is an epoxy that will do this too - Chuck at Duckworks told me that Silvertip from System 3 has a good pot life, but would kick off well over lunchtime so you you could sand or shape and move onto the next phase.
• The duct taping - this worked similarly to stitch and glue .... it never FEELS like it is going to work, but as you get more tape on the boat gets more and more solid. I even was able to turn the boat over with the inside only just newly glassed without it going out of alignment.
• Water based glue - this was a bad decision for seasonal reasons - in the winter and with the heavy rain outside the shed it just was not going to dry ... just like my clothes that I had just washed. Just wouldn't dry and also it ran everywhere compared to epoxy. It is way messier than epoxy for an experienced epoxy user, though the cleanup was OK. I guess I will see if it stains the timber when i try to apply varnish to the interior. It meant I spent a lot of time waiting for things to dry so I could move onto the next phase and couldn't do final trimming or shaping of bits to move onto paint and varnish.
• My own fatigue - I ran out of oomph - I really started from scratch, marking the ply on Friday morning - it was too cold for the polyester to kick off well by itself so I flipped the boat (shows how effective the duct tape is) and put a heater under. The glassing kicked off in half an hour while I had lunch and I was able to sand down the outside chine to radius it for glass taping and do it ... but after that was held up badly by the glue.

But it was pretty good fun despite having to go back on saturday to fit the keel/skeg arrangement ... wait wait for glue, inwales ... wait wait for glue, seats ... (you guessed it).



It is the most disappointed I have been building a boat in a day and a half - which is still rather good in some ways. But I was hoping to get almost everything done in one day.

What I was busy with last week – building a Quick Canoe|Michael Storer Wooden Boat Plans

MIK