Building a Cedar Strip Canoe

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Webb's first actual construction project involved erecting the shaping mold around which the boat would be built. This assembly consisted of a giant 15' sawhorse known as the strongback, several precut—roughly semicircular—pieces called formers that define the inverted outline of the boat, and two quarter-circle plywood sections used to shape the boat's ends. (Peter worked with an early version of the Old Town kit and thus had to make his own plywood formers, using patterns provided by the manufacturer . . . a straightforward trace-and-cut procedure. The canoe company's current kit includes 13 precut formers.)

Constructing the strongback . . . marking the exact locations for the formers and stem ends . . . attaching these curved sections . . . and making sure (and double sure) that every piece was perfectly aligned and leveled were steps that had to be taken with great care, since the completed mold determines the shape of the finished canoe. With that in mind, Peter spent 17 full hoursover a period of four days—erecting the skeletonlike structure. And when he was done, he checked the curve of the boat-to-be's lines by holding some cedar strips at various places around the form. Then he detached the sections of the end formers that would actually become part of the boat's stems, inscribed a confident "LOOKS GOOD!" in the project journal he kept, and began the next step . . .

STRIPPING THE BOAT

Mold building had been partly an exercise in imagination, since Peter was then constructing something that would define, but would not be part of, the finished craft. However, "stripping", the actual laying on of the beautiful thin cedar pieces that constitute the body of the vessel, offered him the special satisfaction of seeing—line by line—a canoe take form. It was a slow but eminently rewarding step, and Peter—a conscientious craftsman if ever there was one—obviously reveled in it. (His journal even declares that "working with cedar is an olefactory delight"!)

Peter's basic procedure for laying a strip was to staple a board into position against the formers, lay a thin bead of glue along one edge of the thin plank, and then staple the next strip alongside. Following the advice given by Hazen in The Stripper's Guide, Webb built the floor of the canoe first. And since a canoe is naturally much wider along its middle than at its ends, most of the strips that made up the boat's base did not run the full length of the craft but had to be cut and shaped to fit. It took Peter two full days to lay, staple, glue, and trim the football-shaped bottom section. Then he began fitting—beveling a strip's edge when necessary—and fastening the beautiful full-length pieces that run from the vessel's floor to its gunwales and form the sides of the craft.

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