A Genuine Canoe Building & Paddle Sport Repair Shop
Selecting the Wood
You can build a canoe from any species wood. Canoe builders have successfully re-purposed bamboo chopsticks, discarded redwood picnic tables and cypress doors. Sadly, we also know of builders that used lead-heavy species and knot/resin laden bargain bin wood. For centuries boat builders have chosen the cedars over other woods with good reason. Ponder these points as you weigh your wood alternatives:
• Availability - free doesn’t mean it’s the best wood for your canoe, exotic impossible to locate species are no better
• Work-ability - strips needs to bend, twist and follow curves without splitting, you want wood that responds to a knife or block plane like butter
• Weight – on average a tandem canoe consumes a little over one cu/ft of wood - roughly 25 lbs for a cedar, redwood or Sitka spruce hull
• Strength - less critical because strength comes from the lamination, a more porous softwood allow deeper resin penetration / better bond
• Cost – compare like lumber grades, remember a 3/16 circular saw kerf turns 40% of what you bought into sawdust.
Clear vertical grain boat-suitable wood is perhaps 3-to-5% of all the wood harvested and milled. Big-box home improvement stores focus on construction grade lumber not canoe-quality strips. If you're on a budget, we understand. Know you're getting the best material available for building small boats when you choose NWC cedar strips.
Before you embark on a scavenger hunt for wood, ask yourself... would you mill your own tongue & groove oak to install a new hardwood floor in the den? Rip larger stock into 2x4’s to build a garden shed? If you answer yes then by all means satisfy the need to bond with the tools in your home woodshop. Have fun with the wood hunt and check out these links: Wood Species Overview, Wood Strengths, Boat Building Lumber.
It takes 1200-to-1300 lineal feet of NWC cedar strips to build most tandem canoes, roughly $450-500 for strips. An easy method to figure the lineal footage you need for any particular hull design is to measure the the distance gunwale to gunwale around the center form. Divide that distance by .75 for square cut or .625 if you plan to build with bead 'n cover strips. Multiply the quotient by the length of the canoe. For example, the #6 center form, on the 13 foot NWC Tadpole measures 44-inches. 44 ÷ .75 = 58.6, 59 x 13 = 767.
Cut strips one-quarter inch. With thinner 1/8th or 3/16ths strips, it’s quite likely you’ll sand through the hull, oops. The weight savings is nil. Thicker strips are hard to work and will not add significant strength. Cut out all knots; knots contain tree juice and epoxy will not bond to oily sap, delaminating can be a problem. No way around it, cutting strips remains a dusty painstaking task
Quality is key
Look for the highest classification of board lumber called select. Select is subdivided into three categories: B, C, and D Select. B is the highest quality. Purchase D grade select or better for your canoe. Most doit-yourselfers will choose a table saw with a narrow kerf blade to cut strips. A bandsaw works well and consumes less wood, providing you have an adequate rip fence and support the wood as it passes over the smaller table. You can also use a handheld circular saw fitted with a narrow kerf blade and a temporary fence affixed to the sole plate.