Have a Seat

This was actually supposed to publish in February. . .

Canoe Blog Update –

So, it has been months since the last update.  Thanks Winter for killing my speed.  However, this is not to say that it hasn’t been a busy January.  Because I have the best wife in the world, I have moved my project into the sitting room in our house.  Unfortunately, the sitting room is only 15 feet long and so my 16 foot canoe sticks out a foot into our dining room.  “Honey, could you pass the salt over the canoe?”

First, you missed the seat caning.  I used pre-manufactured seat cane (called “press” or “pressed” cane – you will see why in a minute).  The seats on the boat, from the 60’s were built using wood for the frames, and then the central rectangle where your butt goes, is filled with cane that is pressed into channels around the perimeter of the seat hole.  The process was the easiest thing with the greatest impact.

So, you cut the cane to about 3” wider than your channels.  You take your cane and you soak it for about 45 minutes to get it pliable.  Once done, you align the cane over the frame so that you are square to the frame and so that there is an even excess around the channels.  Starting on one of the longer sides, you take small, dull, wooden wedges and drive them into the channel, which bends the cane into the channel.  Staying evenly placed along the same row (row of holes) on the cane, start in the middle and work your way to the corners.  Once you have a straight line along the channel of indented cane, a long bead of glue goes on next.  Then, you take the wooden spline, and tap it into the channel, mitering the ends to a 45-degree cut.  Use caution with the spline – try using a thin block of wood to protect the spline and the frame when tapping it in. (Like a floor installer.)  Then move to the opposite side, which pulls the cane in tighter.  Again, the process is the same, again finishing with the spline. 

Once you are complete – all the way around and spline in place, there is some excess cane which is cut readily with a very sharp knife.  I say this after a tough lesson learned, but I suspect everyone makes this same mistake – As you are cutting the cane off of the frame, be cautious – the cane is wet, and bumpy which makes the knife slip and skate across your finished frames. 

The final cane, after you are done may have some unsightly minor “waves” or “bubbles” it in – Mine had this, but it dried really nicely, and they are perfectly smooth.

Now, I should mention, this entire segment took me about 2 hours, including soaking time where I was watching TV.  However, to get the seats ready, it was probably 20 hours of grinding out the old cane where the previous repair was done with hard core epoxy cement.  Grinding, chiseling, sanding and dynamite to remove it, but the channels were clean.  Once completed, I sanded down the surfaces, and varnished the finish product with high gloss urethane.  I did all of this before even buying the cane.  Once the cane is in place, there is no need to varnish this – I think it would just make it brittle.

Second was to replace the stems on each end.  The stems, as you may remember were cut out based on the significant rot, and the hundreds of holes in them.  These required replacement by steambending pieces of Ash, one of the world’s harder woods.  5^th time is the winner.  See the trick to this – more important than the wood, or the steam, is the jig you use.  So, I initially used someone’s jig at the boat school – Fail.  Their boat was a different year, and in turn the arc was too wide.  So what do I do?  I try it a second time.  Surprisingly, trying the same thing twice and expecting a different result is really disappointing.

So I went out, bought some plywood, and 2x4s and made a jig by tracing the canoe ends and surprisingly succeeded. 

Steambending is half art, half luck and half patience.  I know this is 3-halves, but when you bend the wood 5 times to get two good pieces, you get a little extra.  So the first trick is to make your starting piece just a little bigger than your final product.  In my case, I made it twice as thick as I needed.  Did I mention that Ash is really, really hard?  Next I took the wood and soaked it for about 2 weeks.  They say that the soaked wood will eventually stop saturating (“they” would be science), but I figured longer in the bath couldn’t hurt – and I was right.  I then hooked up the steam box, which is really a bomb that generated steam channeled into a long wooden box sealed at one end and open on the other where you put your wood.  I left the wood schpritz for an hour and then brought it into my homemade jig.  Now, you might think that this is easy, but I can assure you, it is all about brute force and that luck stuff above.  We took the end, and stuck it into the fixed aspect of the jig and as we went to pull it around the end just exploded into splinter.  We lost about the first 8 inches of the 5 foot piece (I only needed about 2 feet of material – the rest is leverage.)  A quick trip to the chop saw gave me a fresh start, and we went at it again, this time getting it 95% of the way around the jig.  The last inch, I and my team of stout men pushed and pushed until an observer noted that we were stuck on the floor.  Some adjustments later and we were in.  C-Clamps evenly spaced held it in place overnight while it dried in place. 

I can say, that this like many of these canoe building tasks is really a 2 (or more) person task.  Prepping the wood and steaming it was easy, but there were four of us bending the wood around the jog and securing it in place. 

Some real lessons learned here –

-          Straight grain is the key. If all of the grain is running in parallel, it flexes a little easier.

-          Using some form of metal strapping helps guide the piece around the jig, but it has to have slack in it.  This is hard to envision, but a piece of metal (which has no give in its length) that has been beat up with bends along the length, will straighten out along the jig.

-          Have extra wood.  Norm Abrams may make it look easy, but he has a lot of kindling off camera. 

-          Have friends.

So, here we are.  The canoe, when you saw it last had a bunch of intentionally cut holes in the bottom of it.  I have since milled down old (and some new) cedar to fill those holes and now they are in place.  A couple of interesting aspects of this work. 

I made replacement planks out of new and used cedar boards and then cut them to shape.  Using a sanding sealer, I got the color a little darker, but there is not perfect match.  I then varnished all of the interior faces, even the aspects you won’t see, just to get a solid coat on the boards.  These boards are attached to the ribs (the u-shaped pieces you can see inside a canoe), by driving brass tacks through the board and into the rib.  The tacks are a bit long, so you use a 3-pound block of shaped steel to round over the heads of the tacks.  This steel piece is called a clinching iron.  This is pretty much a two person job, but beyond the skills of my six year old son.  So, using the brute force method of plowing through anything, I would place the tack into the board with predrilled holes.  Then I would reach up underneath the canoe holding the iron against the rib in the “right” place.  Overall, about a 90% effectiveness rate over the 200 tacks I drove.  I then enlisted my Saint Amy, my wife, to help with the rest – truly a test of her physical strength and marital communications.  You see, I couldn’t see where she was so I would have to give guidance on where I would hit next, and then she would move the iron, and I would strike.  In a perfect world.  My world – not so perfect, as I work too fast, and the iron is exhausting on the arms.  So I would tell Amy where to move the iron, while swinging, and she would yell, and I would get pissed.  Perfect love.

So with most of the boards now replaced, I was onto some of the tougher pieces.  I had two pieces that were along some serious bends in the canoe.  Interestingly, you follow a similar steaming process, but it is a little easier.  I placed one end of the new plank into the hole, along a straighter, flatter end of the repair and loosely tacked it into place.  Once in place, I took a wet rag, and placed it over the repair part.  I then “ironed” it into place, using a hot iron, with full steam, fundamentally steambending the part in situ.  I would take the piece and gradually tack it in along its length, ironing more as I went around the tighter turns.  It was pretty cool.

Next I took the stems and cut them, using the scarph joints I described previously.   I was able to get both cuts right the first time, using minor sanding to align them.  I then took my Marine Epoxy and glued them into position, using tacks through the joint to set them in place, and clamps to secure the rig.  I then ran a string from stem to stem to make sure the line was true.  There is nothing better than your 6-year old son “helping” you check the alignment of the string – Watching him eye it up and tell you he agrees with your assessment that it is true.  Hog staring at a wristwatch.  But I love that boy for trying.

Interesting note – Marine Epoxy is not designed for all water craft, despite what you might think.  Marine Epoxy is for what we call “Tupperware” boats – Boats made from resin, fiberglass, or plastic – NOT WOOD.  The next night, I went to work on the bow stem, and while trying to drive the nails into it to hold the planks in place, the Ash stem, carefully bent and ready for use, came off in my hand.  I then walked down to the stern, and bent the other stem – 5-degrees until it too snapped off in my hand.  A quick trip to Home Depot for Gorilla Glue epoxy and I was back in business.  Well, at least back to work. 

You see, I am a believer that when doing work with explosives, a “little extra” can’t hurt.  I think epoxy works the same way.  So I had globbed on quite a bit of Marine Epoxy onto the joint.  Twenty minutes on each end of the boat with a grinder bit on the dremel, and the shop vac running, I was back to bare wood. 

Same for both new stems.

And some of the wood around the joint. 

Yeah, it was basically a plastic-y mess.

So with that cleaned up, I re-glued the stems, re-tacked them, re-clamped them, re-strung them, and got Fletcher’s approval on the string – again.

Now, stems are in, it was time to connect the planks that flow into the wedge shaped stems.  Most of the planking had holes drilled in from the original nails, so I used these as pilots and drilled into the Ash stems.  Here is the challenge with this part –

Imaging you have a triangle with no bottom – Like two playing cards placed to create an “A” with no lateral support.  Now, take a hammer and hit one side.  Welcome to my world.  Because there was really no structural support on the opposite side of the non-flat surface, I had to use the Clinching Iron to effectively back-stop the force on the opposite side of the struck face.  Now, I could have asked Saint Amy to help here, but I wasn’t sure our marriage could handle it.  Like I said the iron is really heavy.  I looked like an octopus – arms and legs everywhere, holding the boat steady, holding the nail in place, and driving it with a hammer.  But I can say it is almost done (One of the newer pieces of wood I had placed at the top of the bow simply fell apart as I nailed it in place, so I will be replacing that this week)

Now, in between all of these steps, I have been varnishing, and sanding and varnishing and sanding.  I think I have about 4 coats on the boat now on everything.  The seats and thwarts are back in the boat now, as you can see and it is taking shape.  Next week, I hope to get the decks back into place, and then it is ready for canvas.  Thanks for the patience – Postings have suffered lately, but I am back and in the final stretch.