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I might build a canoe
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: I might build a canoe (in reply to estebanana)
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Build an ocean-going canoe, shanghai a Japanese crew with you as captain, put on your anthropologist's hat, and reverse engineer Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon Tiki voyage in which he tried to prove Polynesia could have been originally settled by voyagers from South America. He was wrong, of course, as we know Polynesia, and indeed most of the Pacific, was settled by Malays out of Indonesia. Nevertheless, your mission will be to attempt to prove that Polynesia and the Pacific were settled by Voyagers out of Japan, most likely the Ainu. Take plenty of Shochu with you, and a cat-o'-nine-tails to keep the crew in line.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 11 2017 21:31:58
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timoteo
Posts: 219
Joined: Jun. 22 2012
From: Seattle, USA
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RE: I might build a canoe (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
Someone asked me to build them a canoe. They want to pay me. They own a shochu distillery. Should I take money? I need money, but I like shochu.
Have any of you made a canoe? I already make very expensive paddles, how much harder can it be?
If you haven't decided already, consider building a skin-on-frame kayak, canoe, or umiak. If not for your client, then just for fun - they're great for fishing ...
I think you will find the skin-on-frame construction has a lot of aspects that might appeal to you. It's a traditional construction method of indigenous arctic peoples. It's essentially a lightweight grid structure made from relatively thin pieces of wood (e.g. a 1"x2" would be the largest, for the gunwales, but the majority would be more like .25"x1") then covered by fabric (traditionally sealskin, but nowadays woven nylon sealed with something like polyurethane).
The resulting product is similar to a shoji screen or the wing of a Zero - the translucent fabric exposes the underlying wood frame and makes it quite beautiful. You can dye or paint the fabric (orange, if you like), so that there's a lot of opportunity for creative expression. The end result is an extremely lightweight (25lb!), very strong, and very repairable vessel. If you've ever tried to lift a 70lb plastic kayak or aluminum canoe onto the roof of a car by yourself, or tried to move one from the parking lot to the water hundreds of feet away, you know that the weight does have a major impact on where / how often you use the kayak, and in the end how much you enjoy using it.
The wood dimensions are similar to what you use for guitar building, so you will already have the tools you need - in fact it lends itself to being built with hand tools. You will need to do some bending, which you're already comfortable with. As for the type of wood ... Hinoki or Port Orford are IDEAL for the task - they are the best wood to use because of their strength, flexibility, amenability to bending, and especially rot resistance. The joints are mortised or pegged, and sewn. No glue or nails or screws.
As far as the economics of the deal, again it's similar to a guitar; a skin-on-frame involves several hundred dollars of materials (depending on how nice the wood is) plus several thousand dollars of labor. Say a final price about $3k. You could ask the customer to pay the material costs so there would be no expense out of pocket, then say 5 cases of the good stuff (which would cost him 1/2 of the retail price). He would get a beautiful boat for considerably less than a mass-produced one, and you would have enough shochu for a long time and potentially the start of a new side-business. Your only investment would be the learning time and the labor.
I have some plans I could send you, if you're interested. Similar to guitar plans, they're a great starting point to the get basic proportions correct, but no need to be constrained by them.
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Date May 17 2017 22:16:11
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: I might build a canoe (in reply to estebanana)
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Timeteo,
I am familiar with the skin boat of Unalaska, a very beautiful thing. I read George Dyson's book Baidarka when it was first published. I've been a fan of the skin boat ever since.
I showed this website: http://boat-building-plans.com and the boats to the guy who asked me build a canoe for him and he balked on the skin boat. I don't know why, maybe when I told him how much I want to build it. Sometimes people think that craftspersons just work for the good health and good will of making an object.
I think he wants a strip built canoe, and that will cst three times as much for me to make...he's going go to research and meet me again next Thursday. But I've lost interest now, I'm not excited about the project after I spend a ot of time invested explaining it and then have the customer get cold feet. I've learned from guitar making not to chase too far or spent too much time explaining if they are just kicking tires.
There are a couple of skin boats in the Hearst Anthropology Museum in Berkeley. I've seen them, they are not on display, but in the abyssmally defunct object storage facility. I applied for a position at the museum twice in 6 years, but I have the feeling they were only going through the motions of an interview because in both instances the position was withdrawn after a few weeks after interviews were conducted. I never knew why they decided not to staff the position, but in the first set of interviews I got to the last round and had to go back twice for three hours.
The second day of interviews was an exhaustive tour of all the object storage facilities, which meant I probably had the job in the bag, but like I said they withdrew the job. The object storage is mainly underground, the museum sits on land on the UCB campus and there is a huge green lawn next to the museum, a quad, under that is a vast network of halls, rooms, offices and two levels of storage. You don't get to see it unless you get taken under. The office for the museums NAGPRA project is located there, and i was told I'd be a part of that. Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act- making and loading special containers for transporting native remains that were in the collection. Then they showed me a special door, and we went through and entered a space surrounded by a chain link fence full of what looked like library shelving units...full of shallow boxes of bones.
I can't say what else I saw online, out of respect. We did go into another section where the artifacts were stored. A huge series of rooms, arrayed with tables and standing self units. I was particularly interested in one area where a bunch of boat models were stacked and separated by plastic sheets. There was an Egyptian funerary boat model, covered with dust looked straight out of a rock tomb. A bunch of other stuff like models of the Titanic, various warships, half hull models, and hanging above our heads suspended in two places by rope loops attached to the beams were two Unalaska skin boats.
The boats were cradled by ropes and where the ropes bore the weight of the boats they sagged under their own weight. Whomever rigged the boats for that storage area did not even think to cut a narrow length of wood plank support the the boats lengthwise. I knew something about skin boats so I mentioned to the curator handling me through the tour that I knew exactly how to mitigate the storage condition of these objects, the hanging boats, and she replied that it will be sometime down the line before this room is addressed as it is low priority on the budget.
I don't know if anyone ever addressed that storage condition, but I think a lot of object went to pot and rot in the so called 'object storage facilities ' of that place. If they had hired me I would have done the correction on my own time if it was not in the budget.
The second time I interviewed 6 or 7 years later I had done more work in the field, gained more experience and was still thinking about the condition of the skin boats. The interview panel asked me if I would be comfortable cleaning plexiglass vitrines and sweeping the gallery floor with a dust mop before the doors open. I said of course, I just want a job, but I happen to know a great deal about the collection here already and I eager to help in anyway.
They told me that they felt I was very overqualified for the job and offered it to someone else. The second time the job had changed and become less about the collection and more about housekeeping and gallery support for the curators. But I suspect they were looking for someone who was not ambitious or hyper engaged or intelligent enough to do hard research, because I would have mastered the collection. My prior experience had been that curators like dumb subordinates who don't outshine them.
Now that I have vented my spleen on the subject of dimwit curators, yes I would love to see the skin boat plans you so generously offer to share.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date May 18 2017 6:10:41
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timoteo
Posts: 219
Joined: Jun. 22 2012
From: Seattle, USA
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RE: I might build a canoe (in reply to estebanana)
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I should have guessed you would know about skinboats.
My first exposure to one was when I visited the National Museum of the American Indian in DC, shortly after it was first opened. Right there in the lobby was a reproduction of a Netsilingmeot kayak (it was still there a few years ago when I went back) - I had never seen such a thing and it immediately captured my imagination. I seemed to understand immediately everything about it - why it was made that way, what the advantages were, how it was made without metal tools. Up until then I had never thought of owning a kayak, but after spending a very long time examining it (to the annoyance of my family, who wanted to get out of the lobby and into the actual exhibits) I knew that I had to build one just like it.
I later located this book ( https://www.amazon.com/Building-Skin-Frame-Robert-Morris/dp/1551924447 ) which describes how that kayak was built, as well as some others, including the Dyson book, and also found a lot of websites such as http://www.arctickayaks.com/plans.htm where you can download plans drawn from historic kayaks, some dating back more than 200 years. And of course I've seen a few originals in museums and many replicas on the water. A lot of the people who build these boats currently are located around here, between Seattle and Vancouver, including both Morris and Dyson, although historically these types of boats were only built in the Arctic and were rarely seen in the Salish Sea. Around here the first peoples made beautiful dugouts which are also amazing, just totally impractical because of their weight. I have entertained the notion of building a boat with the form of one of those dugouts but the construction of a skinboat, but I can't figure out how to skin the concave surfaces. (Notice in the video on the boat-building-plans.com site, the boat he takes into the water around minute 7 has a slight concavity on the bow and stern, and as he's walking down the ramp to the dock you can see that the fabric doesn't conform to the frame - it forms a chord across the curved surface. You can get away with that for small concavities, but for very large ones like the dugouts have it doesn't work - it would be like cling wrap stretched over a shallow bowl, the skin would be flat, even though the bowl curves away beneath it.
Give me a few days and I'll scan the plans and pm them to you.
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Date May 19 2017 5:45:50
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: I might build a canoe (in reply to timoteo)
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My only experience with a skin boat was at the village of Barrow on the northernmost point of Alaska.
At the beginning of the 1950s the USA was initiating a top-secret project nearby. My father flew up from Anchorage occasionally to see how things were going. Twice he took me along.
At first the main thing that interested me was one of the world's largest HO gauge model railroad layouts. My brother designed, built and flew model airplanes, I did HO gauge model railroad stuff. During the long dark winter the troops at Barrow had to stay indoors much of the time, or access other areas through tunnels. The model railroad was a big recreational asset.
On my first trip to Barrow, during high summer, I met the grandson of one of the Inupiat leaders. He was close to my age, 12 years. An Air Force officer told me the grandfather was the Chief of Barrow, but the grandson explained that the leadership was considerably more complex. One of his grandfather's roles was leading seal hunting parties on the ice during winter.
As we walked about the village the grandson showed me a skin kayak, with seats for two people. While hunting one man could maneuver the boat while another handled a harpoon. We were allowed to take a short cruise near shore, but failed to spot any beluga whales, as we had hoped.
About six months later, in the depth of Arctic winter I went to Barrow again with my father. I asked to see the grandson, and learned from him that on a recent seal hunting trip his grandfather had been stalked, killed and mostly eaten by a polar bear.
I expressed my sympathy. The grandson said that Nanuk, the ice bear, was the founder of his human family. His grandfather was getting old, and would not have been able to lead the hunting party many more times. It was an honor for him to have been taken by Nanuk, the greatest of the seal hunters.
RNJ
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Date May 19 2017 22:12:34
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bluespiderweb
Posts: 18
Joined: Mar. 24 2017
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RE: I might build a canoe (in reply to timoteo)
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The talk of lightweight canoes reminds me of the author George Washington Sears, pen named Nessmuk, who wrote about camping and the outdoors in the 1800's for magazines in NY city. He wrote a couple of books, and in his Woodcraft book, he details his search for a lightly built canoe. In the neighborhood of 15-18 pounds, and his preferred clinker built (lapstrake) from cedar. He touches on other methods of building as well, and their limitations. It is not an all inclusive nor technical building manual, but he details his search for the perfect canoe, with some stories to go along with that. Besides all the other woodcraft and camping methods he used, and of course, hunting and fishing for living and traveling light in the woods and water.
The small book is quite an entertaining read, for a window to the past of how things were approached and thought of at the time. Here is the link to the book if anyone is interested.:
https://www.amazon.com/Woodcraft-Camping-George-Sears-Nessmuk/dp/0486211452/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1495349025&sr=1-1&keywords=Nessmuk
_____________________________
Barry
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Date May 21 2017 15:44:21
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