I needed a desk, so I took a short break from the canoe. 60 1/2 low angle block plane which would've been much more suitable to the task. 5 jack plane, which worked pretty well, though it's not great for curves (it's designed to eliminate curves after all). All I had at the time was an old Stanley No. Next I then planed the panels together down to the line on the original plank. What a difference that made! Don't cheap out on blades, folks. I started off with a $4 plywood sawblade from Home Depot, but ended up upgrading to a fancy 40 tooth Diablo blade I got in a two-for-one deal. This is what I ended up cutting, so now I have a decent sized chunk of marine plywood left over for later use.įinally ready to get started! Step one is lofting.įirst set of panels cut! I used a circular saw set to the shallowest cut that makes it through the sheet, and cut on top of and directly into a sacrificial piece of cheap ply I found on the side of the road. Turns out the remaining 15 pieces can fit on two sheets of plywood, meaning I could've cut the first set to the original measurements while still only needing 3 sheets of ply. I took a picture of the plans, color-coded each plank, and played around with them a little in inkscape. I ended up guessing at an offset, marked that out, then used the original measurements from that line, which worked pretty well. However this means you have to recalculate all the measurements for those three planks. Who would want to buy an extra sheet of sixty some dollar plywood? They say approximately how this can be done - shift up plank 3, flip planks 4 and 5.
#Stitch and glue canoe plans how to
The plans as given show how to mark out the planks to fit on 4 sheets of plywood, but they hint that in can be done on 3. You mark out one set, then use that as a template for the rest. This design is symmetric left and right and front and rear, so it's made from 4 identical sets of 5 planks. I opted for 5mm, assuming it'd be the sweet spot on the scale of light to durable. The plans say this can be built in 4, 5, or 6mm marine plywood (without giving guidelines to help you decide). You'd be hard pressed to build this boat without some auxiliary instruction, which I'm getting from a couple books. The drawings look fine, but the plans contain very little information, leaving a lot up to guesswork or other sources. It has 5 planks per side, with a little tumblehome, which gives it a nice rounded shape, contrary to many S&G canoe designs I've seen, which tend to look a little angular. I'm building the 15'8 "Prospector" design by Selway Fisher.
The goal is to eventually build a stitch-and-glue sailboat, but figured I should start with something smaller to make mistakes on.