The Canoe Gods and Penance.

In some previous posts, I've alluded to two B.N. Morris canoes that I've done restoration work on. There's a bit more story to tell about the first one.

The first Morris that I dealt with was a canoe that belonged to my Scoutmaster when I was a teenager. While I don't know what particular model it was, it looked like the one in the picture above and had belonged to someone in his wife's family. (The one in the picture is a reproduction from the Northwoods Canoe Company) The canoe had Mahogany trim all over. This boat was in pretty nice shape with the exception of the rot that seems to be typical on the ends of the stems at the bow and stern and the canvas was shot. I should point out that the B.N. Morris canoes had closed gunnels like in the picture below:


This allowed the water trapped in the canoe when it was stored upside-down to travel down to the tips of the stems and cause rot in this area. I should note that most people are more familiar with open gunwale canoes like the Old Town in the picture below. Water can come out through the scuppers created by the spacing that the ribs create between the inwale and the outwale. A little bit more to follow on this detail later.


My father offered to help him restore this canoe for a trip that we were planning in the summer. We started off by removing the rotten wood and scarfing in new sections of Cedar ribs, stem, inwale and planking. Some new pieces of Mahogany were scarfed to the ends of the trim pieces that covered the top of the gunwales and made up the outwale. We also had to scarf in some sections of new deck. Once the woodwork was done, we stripped the old varnish and re-varnished the interior. Seat cane was replaced and new floorboards (AKA "duckboards") were fabricated.

Now comes the sin.

I should note that canoes with closed gunwales like the Morris are very "early" designs. Bert N. Morris started building canoes in his home in Veazie Maine around 1882 and finally opened a successful factory there. It was one of the largest canoe companies with a widely known name until a fire destroyed the factory in 1920. After the fire, some canoes were still built under the Morris name for a short time, but as I understand it, ultimately Morris went to work for the Old Town canoe company. The canoe we were working on was both very old and sought after. Other than the small amount of rot at the tips, it was really in pretty pristine shape.

Right until we fiber-glassed it.

Fiberglass should really never be put on a traditional rib and plank canoe. It's just not right. For the most part, I have to say, "Forgive us, because we really didn't know any better." -the owner and my father didn't really know this at the time and figured that they were saving the canoe. I know my father had expressed some interest in re-canvasing the canoe, but the owner figured that the fiberglass was a final solution. (It is, but not for the best...) Worse still, we used forest green tinted Polyester resin. I can still smell the Styrene. Overall, we did a pretty good job with the Polyester and the canoe looked and paddled OK, but it was still the wrong thing to do.

I figure that due to this event in my past, I am doing my penance to the Canoe Gods by researching, building, and writing about traditional and semi-traditional wooden canoes. One of the reasons that I took a Cedar and Canvas Canoe building class at WoodenBoat School was to do a good job of restoring the second Morris Canoe that I've gotten my hands on - a boat I found by the side of the road with some rot at the tips and pink Polyester resin on the outside!

U.F.O.

I didn't post a picture with today's post. I did this deliberately and you will thank me for it as you read onwards.

As part of the preparations for Thanksgiving next week I decided that it was time that the fridge got a real cleaning from top to bottom. I took out shelves and bins and actually scrubbed the inside of the fridge. Admit it. How often do you do that? When doing food shopping, unfortunately, we have a relatively small fridge (for here in the US, might I add) and when the new food arrives, the things that were already here have a tendency to migrate to the back of the fridge.

As part of the cleaning process I discovered several U.F.O.'s. These are Unidentified Food Objects. We're talking about the kind of things that your kid's biology teacher asks students to bring into class when they do the segment on fungi. We're usually relatively frugal here with the notable exception of food. Still, we do try to avoid buying too much food and having more leftovers than we can eat. DD did a segment at Nature's Classroom where they even applied the proper name to this food. Ort.

Ort : (n) a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.

They would even go to the effort of weighing the ort at the end of a meal to show the kids how much food they had wasted. This would be conveyed at the end-of-meal "ort report".

While we try to avoid ort, the process of pushing things to the back of the fridge provides for the occasional surprise. Over the past few weeks, DW and I seem to have been spread fairly thin, so we were probably due for what we found during today's fridge clean out. I must say there were some interesting things. I'll let your imagination run wild with the colors, textures and aromas. They included:

• Psychedelic Technicolor (once) fresh Mozzerella
• Fuzzy Peach Jam
• Liquid cucumber (fortunately an "English" cucumber still in the plastic wrapper)
• Grey pickled Jalapeno peppers. (No, not fuzzy, just grey.)
• A whole wheat flatbread wrap that was more like a Saltine cracker than bread.
• A jar with a solid cake of Sesame Tahini at the bottom that required a knife to remove.
• One shriveled and totally dessicated strawberry.
• A small pool of something very sticky on the bottom shelf. (No sign of actual food or a container of any sort.)
• A small container of grapes that were more like wine-in-a-grape skin
  

To avoid totally grossing anyone out who has ever or might ever eat at my home, I have to say that a) most of the food was packaged and not cross-contaminating anything, and b) many people have (happily) eaten at my home and gone on to live normal healthy lives.

Still, I can say with total honesty that my high-school biology teacher would have been overjoyed to prepare slides from my fridge to look at under the microscope! She would have particularly enjoyed the vibrant colors of the Mozzerella!

A little literary diversion.

Last week one of my students passed on a copy of a book that she'd read for me to look though. I've been pretty busy this week and hadn't even been able to look past the notes on the dust jacket. Today was no exception. After taking DD and a friend out to lunch after my canoe building class this morning, I returned home to scrape the scary (and mostly fluid) pumpkins up with a snow shovel and carry them to the compost bin and do a bit of garage cleaning and organizing.

This evening I got a few moments to sit down with the book. It's The Year of the Boat by Lawrence Cheek and have discovered that it is about his personal journey to build his own wooden boat. It's one of those books with a really incongruous start - the author and would-be boatbuilder is a native of El Paso, Texas - not a real hub of boat building. The chapter titles such as Impatience, Glop, Grit and The Zen of Screwing Up portend some interesting reading.

Ok, that was a new one for me...

I walked out into the lobby yesterday afternoon and happened to walk in on a discussion regarding the upcoming holidays. Our receptionist then made the comment that she'd be spending the holidays with her "spinster starter kit" otherwise known as her two cats.

Struck me funny.

Wordless Wednesday

Grim Reaper?

Probably one of my least favorite cars from a stylistic point-of-view is Chrysler's PT Cruiser. While they were sorta cool when they came out in a very retro way, I quickly became jaded about the styling. More often than not, I can be heard referring to them as a "Sport Utility Hearse".

Today, on my way to work, I saw the following in front of me at a traffic light which only reinforced my opinions.


Note the Grim Reaper on the left. It had flames down the sides and probably over the top of the hood as well as those you see on the bumper.

A bit of detail of the right side of the vehicle is shown below:


It is a bit difficult to read, but the tombstones say things like R.I.P. 1991 Subaru and R.I.P. 1965 Ford Falcon Sedan Delivery.

Ultralight!

The picture above is of the new "lightweight" box-beam strongback and the "light" patterns. For those of you who may not have been following this blog, this design is a Prospector Ranger 15 from Bear Mountain Boats. At 15' long and 35" wide, it is easily the largest canoe that we've ever built at the school where I teach.

We had several concerns with building a boat this large. It was going to be a) big and b) heavy. First, as the boat itself is 35" wide and the main engtry door we go in and out is 36", but the swing of the door prevents us from getting a full width opening. To solve that issue, we move this boat out through the door on it's side as it is only 28" from the bottom of the box beam to the keel of the patterns. Even doing this required shortening the station forms by about 4" and notching the stem and stern forms to lower the whole set of forms.

After you get the canoe through the door, you need to make a 90° turn to go through some (thankfully!) larger doors and down a flight of stairs to get to the basement shop. Once down the stairs, you need to turn again to get the boat in place to work on it. The shop is well equipped, but a bit tight for building 6 canoes at a time. I tell my students that it is a bit like ballet - everybody needs to be in the right place at the right time and know what all the other people are doing!

The station forms are also hollowed out. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was to reduce weight. The weight loss from the station forms alone was 14.5#. I really need to weigh the whole assembly, but when we brought out a Wee Lassie strongback with station forms on it this morning, we put it down and then immediately lifted the "lightened" strongback and station forms of the Ranger. We found them to be comparable weight-wise.

While the bits of material that we've left look deceptively thin, they're at least 3" wide along the edges and 4" wide at the center. I was concerned about warping of these station forms and that has not reared its ugly head, so I'm pleased with that. Overall, a real "thumbs-up" for our new space-age design.