Building a Cedar Strip Canoe

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Only you can decide whether you'd enjoy investing the time and energy in creating a strip boat, and whether owning (and maintaining) such a distinctive canoe is right for you. If so, we believe you can find both the building and the boating very worthwhile. We know Peter Webb did. He's already talking about making another cedar strip canoe himself!

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Old Town Canoe Kit is available for $695 plus $50 shipping and handling from Old Town Canoe Kit, Dept. TMEN, 58 Middle Street, Old Town, Maine 04468. The firm's manual can be purchased alone—for $19.95 postpaid—from the same address. (The price of the guide can be deducted from the cost of the kit if you later decide to buy the company's complete package.)

David Hazen's The Stripper's Guide to Canoe-Building is available in many libraries and bookstores, or for $10.95 plus 95¢ shipping and handling—from Mother's Bookshelf®, P.O. Box 70, Hendersonville, North Carolina 28791.

Stripping From Scratch

This past winter, environmental studies professor Alan Haney began planning a month-long wilderness canoeing expedition in Canada for 11 of his students at Warren Wilson College (in Swannanoa, North Carolina). As part of the group's preparations for their summer learning adventure, they decided to build two of the canoes they'd need. And using David Hazen's The Stripper's Guide to Canoe-Building for their manual, the modern voyageurs acquired a pair of boats for only $200 apiece!

How—you may wonder—did Haney's group keep their material expenses so low? Well—for one thing—they bought 6", 8", and 10" cedar boards from a local lumberyard and then used the school's shop band saw to rip the thin strips they needed. (Since the only cedar boards they were able to obtain were all pretty much the same color, they also cut some redwood strips to add visual variety to the boat shells.) The college crafters purchased the mahogany they used for their canoes' gunwales, but they cut their own cherry—for seats and thwarts —from trees on the rural school's property. In addition, they bought inexpensive, slightly "defective" fiberglass cloth . . . caned their boats' seats themselves ... and made some of their own paddles, with oak shafts, cherry grips, and laminated cedar strip blades. As it turned out, then, their biggest cash outlay went for the gallons of polyester resin they needed. That liquid cost more than $100 per boat!

Warren Wilson College's strippers wasted no time in constructing their canoes: They finished the first in just over 100 hours of total work time . . . and their second (since they were able to reuse the original strongback) required a mere 60 hours! The average time investment per boat, then, was only about half the 160 hours MOTHER's boatbuilder needed to make our strip canoe. However, the wilderness-bound group did happen to have an experienced stripper guiding them . . . they could easily call on several hands to speed up production . . . they didn't suffer any setbacks equal to Peter Webb's fiberglassing fiasco . . . and they weren't so concerned with turning out an immaculately crafted product as they were with quickly completing good usable boats. (Unlike Mr. Webb, for instance, the students did use a belt sander, and they put less effort into such beautifying steps as hull sanding, strip fitting, and gap filling.)

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