Building your own canoe

Plenty of people look at this website to glean ideas for building their own canoe. I hope the following will be useful to you..

Materials:

3 sheets 4mm WBP birchply BB grade or FSC Marine Ply

64 feet/20 metres 12mm x12 mm gunwhale strip timber

3 metres of 25mm x 200 mm timber for seats, yoke and supports

West System Epoxy resin or Polyester resin 4 litres

40 metres of 50mm wide woven glassfibre tape

Disposable Gloves

Disposable Paint Brushes and/or epoxy squeegee

Mixing pots for resin

40 x 50mm stainless steel screws

60 x 20mm stainless steel screws

200 4mm x 200mm natural cable ties

Minimum tools

Pull saw, panel saw, jig saw or circular saw

Drill for cable tie holes

Screw driver

Plans. You can make these up, but you will save a lot of wood buying ready worked plans, and using them carefully. There are lots of 40 year-old plans out there being sold, which are not as good as more recently produced plans, so be careful. We use cable ties, when they used copper wire, to hold the panels together before the resin has set, for example. Look at my links to plans, as you can see I recommend the Jem Iroquois which I was keen for Matt to develop for me, and has proved itself to be exactly what I hoped it would be: quick and easy to build, lovely on the water, and good to look at too. What more could you ask?

Have a good look at the photos. I will add some photos of the templates we use, but also you need to know how to produce your own, so I will explain this. You can measure all the angles cleverly, or simply, or you can just.. too late, must get off to bed..

Note: if you have a powertool which has recently "died" as a result of a broken part, you can either throw it away, or get it mended. The latter is the most efficient form of recycling, and I would like to recommend www.powertoolspares.co.uk who recently located a drive belt for my Bosch sander and shipped it to me for less than I expected to pay in the shops ( where I couldn't find a belt..)