BUILD A FOUR-POWER STILL-WATER CANOE

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MOTHER'S WOODSHOP

By Will Shelton

A wooden boat you can build in a day for under $50.
By John Vivian
Co-design and illustrations
By Will Shelton

Ever dream of building a boat? In your own backyard? We thought so. Building a boat is one of the truly great fantasies that most grown boys and girls have indulged in at one time or another. For most of us, it never gets beyond the dream. Or maybe buying a set of plans and being thoroughly intimidated by instructions that begin: "Using the table of offsets, loft the chine...". Offsets? Loft? What's a chine?

Some of us have gone the next step, bought lumber or a kit, and tried to learn to build a boat the same way we taught ourselves to garden and build our own houses—by reading a book or two and then jes' doin' it. But the boat-building dream dies as our initial enthusiasm is slowly drained by frustration. Conventionally designed and built, even a little dingy requires a great deal of time, specialized tools, and specialized wood crafting skills that are impossible to invent as you go.

A landsman's house or furniture building experience is little help beyond providing basic tool skills. A boat contains precious few straight saw cuts. And words like floor, deck and timber, tiller and sheet—the very term house itself, even—have different meanings, shapes, and functions afloat than ashore. And—unlike garden seeds—chine logs, gunwales, and sheer strakes don't come in handy packets with instructions printed on the back.

Hulls

For peak efficiency in moving through its dense, fluid medium, a non-planing "displacement" (so-called for the amount of water it displaces or moves aside) is molded into a hydrodynamic shape that presents the least wetted surface to the water. So, most boat hulls are shaped like the bottom half of a fish and are curved in every dimension—front to back, side to side and top to bottom—all at the same time.

Of course, the wood that goes into a boat begins as a pile of flat, straight boards. Oak timbers must be shaped into a stout but curved backbone or keel that runs front to back along the bottom. Smaller but still massive boards are sawed or steamed into the curved stem up front at the bow. . . into ribs or timbers that curve up from keel to the chine along the waterline to the upper margin of the hull or the sheer ...and into a pointed stem post at the rear of a canoe or a more-or-less flat transom of a powerboat. The hull is decked on top and is planked along the sides with overlapping boards (like clapboards) in the "clinker built" or lap strake style, or with thick planks that butt along their long edges with a beveled space between that is filled with twine-and-putty caulking. Called carvel planking, this is roughly analogous to squared-log building construction.

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