Monday, November 28, 2011

Mounting the Station Forms

Building a cedar strip canoe is similar to painting in that there seems to be as much work preparing to paint as painting. Here too its all in the preparation of the mold that I will build on.
Once the inner and outer stems are made I could mount the stem mold on the strongback. This involves alot of leveling every way possible and making sure everything is plumb and straight. Here is the completed bow station that is screwed to station mold #6. In addition it is supported at the strongback and two wedges are placed to keep it square. It is very important that these be just right since everything else lines up to the bow and stern.

Here is a string line from the center of the bow and sten across the length of the stronback. This is done with a little building jig that is 1/2 the width of the plywood used for he bow and stern - in other word 5/16". The line provides a top center line to match the centerline scribed on the strongback.

Each station mold is lined up with the center line on the strongback and the centerline of the string. In addition there is a vertical center line on each station mold that must be plumb. You simple adjust or shim the bottom if needed, clamp it to the strips on the strongback and use two course thread drywall screws to attach it. It worked very well. Here are the stations going into place

Once all the stations are attached I covered each with a strip of masking tape to keep the glue from sticking. Then I used a spare cedar strip down the stern, leveled each station form and tacked them to this battan to hold them in place. Unfortunately I did this before I read the insructions to make sure everything was "fair" and as I sighted down the lines I realizd that the one #2 station was just a fraction higher than the #1 station......and that is not a good thing. So..off comes the battan and masking tape and out comes the "surform" to shave off a bit. It all looks good now. The inner stem is clamped in place in order to shave it down as it is shaped to received the cedar strips. Next step is shaping the stems and sorting the cedar strips to decide my pattern.

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