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kevin vivaraies
06-25-2012, 1:46 PM
I have a fiberglass canoe, with wood seats and wood around the top lip. This top piece has rotted out, due to neglect and weather. Will post a pic latter for clarification. My question what wood do I need to use to replace this piece? second is what is the best way to finish this wood?

I want to try to fix this canoe. It was given from a friend that passed away, as a wedding gift. It was starting to break then in 2000, And I just let it go due to no knowledge if it could be fixed.
:mad:

Thanks in advanced.

Mac McQuinn
06-25-2012, 3:22 PM
I like Alaska Cedar for this purpose and would specify Heartwood with Sikkens Cetol for a finish, most Marine suppliers should have it.

Mac

Charles Goodnight
06-25-2012, 9:04 PM
Ok, my renovated kevlar canoe has ash gunnels, mahogany decks, and cherry seats and thwarts. Ash is traditional for the gunnels because it is strong and flexible. The decks are any rot resistant wood. Mahogany was fun, but cedar or teak would also work well. Thwarts and seats are probably traditionally ash, but can be anything. The gunnels and decks are usually finished with a penetrating oil such as Watco. Seats and thwarts are usually spar varnished. Plan on giving the decks and gunnels a quick rub down with oil once in the spring and once in the fall.

kevin vivaraies
06-27-2012, 1:08 PM
here are the photos of the canoe. It looks worse then it is.

http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv336/kevinv_bbq/canoe/IMG_4833.jpg

http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv336/kevinv_bbq/canoe/IMG_4832.jpg

http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv336/kevinv_bbq/canoe/IMG_4831.jpg

http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv336/kevinv_bbq/canoe/IMG_4827.jpg

http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv336/kevinv_bbq/canoe/IMG_4825.jpg

Mac McQuinn
06-27-2012, 1:23 PM
It's going to take some work although if structure is solid, it should be a rewarding project. With some of the old wood for patterns along with existing mounting holes in hull, this should be relatively easy to accomplish. Some cleaning of the hull along with polishing of the gel-coat should make the boat presentable again. Looks like a nice project, good luck.
Mac

kevin vivaraies
06-28-2012, 9:47 AM
thanks for the information, and the encouragement. I will post as the project moves along. Starting to source wood in my area.

Roderick Gentry
06-29-2012, 1:35 AM
Wood is not a good material for gunnels if the boat is stored out of doors. If you can't store the boat under cover, you should probably come up with some composite approach.

Len Mullin
06-29-2012, 3:45 AM
Kevin, we usually used Ash to make the kind of repairs that your looking at making here, and it looks as if it was Ash that was used origionally. As for the seats, what we use for the webbing is the seatbelts out of cars or trucks and cross weave it. If you use these materials to make the repairs, they will last for a very long time. Another item that you should use for making these repairs, is stainless steel screws the brass ones break off to easily and the stainless won't rust or stain the wood. Years ago we used to build cedar strip canoes and kayaks to sell, we did repairs to other types of canoes for a few people who didn't mind paying for the work. To do the repairs to this canoe it would take a couple of days and it would probably cost around three to three hundred and fifty dollars. That would include all of the materials and a good cleaning and waxing. Another thing I would like to mention to you and it is if this canoe was tippy before when you used it, now is the time to fix that. All you have to do is to lower the seats down a little lower into the boat, this will lower your center of gravity and make the canoe allot more stable. Good luck with this project, it looks like you've got a little cutie there that wants to help.
Len

Len Mullin
06-29-2012, 4:11 AM
Kevin I forgot to mention this, but, if we didn't have the Ash at the time we would use Yellow Birch. Actually some people requested that we use it on their canoes, and for a finish on the gunwhales and all other wooden parts, we used the two part clear resin that was used to cover the Cedar strips with. It is similar to what you'd get if you were to purchase a fiberglas repair kit, but it doesn't turn yellow over time like the fiberglas resin does. We use to purchase it in 45 gallon drums and it wasn't cheap as you had to buy both parts A&B at the same time. It has been a few years since I since we've built our last one, and just because of price we won't be building anymore of them. Simply because people didn't want to pay the price that we needed to cover our costs, but there are about twenty of them still out there in use. And most of them still look as good as the day they were built, and all of them were used.
Len

kevin vivaraies
06-29-2012, 2:55 PM
Rodrick. Would the composite materal be strog enough? That I have several sources for deck and wood materals.

Patrick Grady
09-13-2012, 2:24 PM
I have replaced the rails -inside and outside on a Mad River canoe. Don't underestimate this repair. The gunwales provide strength to the canoe hull as well as anchoring the seats. They must conform to compound curves. Within those constraints, weight is an issue - you want max strength, max rot resistance, and min weight. Yes use stainless fasteners. Also consider a caulk seal between rail and hull (it is extra work to tape and do it right but the rot on my rails started by capillary action on the rail-hull interface as well as around the fasteners.). Ash is traditional being a trade off between weight and strength. Ash varnishes well. Repairing and anchoring your seats will take some planning. In my opinion, if you are going to expend the time and effort on this then do the seats properly. Forget the lawn chair, safety belt type webbing. Cain the seats properly. It is not that difficult, and the materials are inexpensive. As suggested prior, definitely lower the seats. In my canoe the seats are anchored within the rails, and then stainless rods lower the seats down like six inches. You might still be able to buy ash rails from one of the canoe makers like Mad River. Having made my own previously, I would recommend looking into buying factory made stuff (shipping is special and you would need to pickup at a sales outlet). Lastly, the rails provide an anchor for the bow and stern decks as well as cross thwarts which are used to carry the canoe so they must also be strong. The repair is worth doing right because the canoe will glide under your paddle like never before.

Charles Goodnight
09-19-2012, 5:29 PM
That's easy peasy. Go to a good canoe store and they can order you a new set of gunnels. For the thwarts and seats I went to eds Canoe. (http://www.edscanoe.com/). I put in fitted mahogany decks (yours are plastic), I got the angle right, then used a bull-nose router bit to rout it out so that it nestled into the gunnels. slightly longer screws hold the deck into the gunnels. Use only stainless steel screws to connect the gunnels together. I think eds canoe has a lot of the stainless steel parts you will need.

You need to get the gunnels from a canoe store because they are some 19 feet long, and you will pay a fortune in shipping unless you can get them to throw them in with a canoe shipment.

Before I installed the gunnels I wiped them down with a thick coat of Watco oil. After I installed them I did it again. I now wipe them down twice a year, and make sure that they are stored under plastic.

Dell Littlefield
09-24-2012, 11:26 AM
Good spar (not polyurethane) varnish is best for covering the gunnels etc. Spar varnish is more flexible and will better protect those parts that flex in use. The existing seats look like rawhide which can be replaced. You could not weave those seats with cane as is, the holes are too far apart. It would be possible to cane them by routing a groove and installing pre-woven cane but the holes would still be apparent.

Alan Schwabacher
12-18-2012, 2:13 PM
I use ash as a readily available strong material for gunwales. I've also used the lighter sitka spruce, but that's no longer so readily available. You can splice shorter stock if you can't find it full length: a scarf joint with an 8:1 slope is plenty strong when glued with epoxy.

I fit the gunwales, including all shaping and screws, then remove them for finishing. I use a thin boatbuilding epoxy (System Three Clear Coat is my favorite) that soaks into all surfaces, including the insides of screw holes. (You can use a test piece to make sure your epoxy is thin enough that you'll be able to reinstall screws after cure. I don't recommend putting the screws in before epoxy cure, because then the gunwales can't be removed without destruction. If you want gunwales like this, just use epoxy and no screws to install the gunwales.) After cure, several coats of UV protective varnish cover the epoxy, but varnish does not need to go in the screw holes.

Now the wood will be well protected after installation, particularly tight spots that hold water. However, abrasion can let in water, so you need to keep the finish in reasonable shape.

Ed Driedger
02-11-2013, 9:29 PM
Ash is definitely the way to go in my experience. Not a hard job - just take your time.

Jack Battersby
01-08-2014, 4:13 PM
Ash is definitely the wood of choice for gunwales. It is hard enough to take a beating, relatively rot resistant, inexpensive, glues up well if you are scarfing two pieces together and takes a nice finish. Most importantly, it will match the seats if you purchase them commercially made as most of them are made of Ash.

For a job like that I would consider using dowel pegs for a through and through of the inner and outer gunwales as the hull is likely made of polyester resin which is horrible to glue to. A through dowel epoxied every 12" or so will work well and be attractive.

Roderick Gentry
01-09-2014, 2:16 AM
Composite would mean something like wood encased in glass. The plastic wood decking is heavy, and not stiff.

Actually, I wouldn't waste time on that boat, it looks like a poor design. I have more than the usual reservations about such projects having been in on the recovery of two bodies from a canoe like that. What is "like" that. Low freeboard, flat bottom at mid section, molded in keel, glassed in floatation, seems to have been shot with a chopper gun. There are some pretty good boats that outwardly look like that, so one can't be sure over the net. Oh, I noticed another one, a stiffener on the inside, that along with the keel are an indication the layup is not stiff enough without these kludges, so again, shot glass. Now if it has a name, or it was made of Kevlar or something, it might be OK. Otherwise, you would be throwing money and time at junk. Is there any reason to believe he was knowledgeable and skilled at canoeing? Did he disappeat into the wilds for weeks, run river, own several other boats, etc... How heavy, how long.

I was watching this messy people show. The lady who came along to get the guy all cleaned up, wanted to know why he was holding on to an ancient vacuum cleaner. Apparently it reminded him of his mother (yikes). She asked how would he feel if they framed a picture of it. I now do this with the kids. "So you want to hold onto that dead snake... Click!". At your stage in life, I am sure you don't need any such advice, but maybe a pic would do, or could you salvage the deck as a corner table, Or cut a piece of glass out with the company badge riveted on it, and put a pic of your friend over it in a frame from one of the seats. If it is a memorial you want, maybe you can zero in on something more manageable, and that won't end up getting you, or the next person, killed.

Jack Battersby
01-09-2014, 9:33 AM
Roderick,

You could be absolutely correct about the design, however if I could add just a couple of clarifications, a composite boat is defined as the combination of 2 or more materials to create characteristics which cannot be found in just one material. So any boat made of fiberglass is a composite boat. Most people think FRP stands for fiberglass reinforced plywood. Not sure what started that misconception, but it actually stands for Fiber reinforced plastic or Polymer, which in most cases means epoxy or polyester resin. So by its very definition, any fiberglass boat with or without core is composite construction.

I have laid up a number of composite canoes and kayaks as well as built my share of wooden boats (30 in the last 4 years) and virtually any composite canoe worth its salt will have some type of stiffening built into the hull. Particularly a laker with wider, flatter bottoms. When designers build keels into molds for composite boats it is primarily for longitudinal stiffening of the hull. In some cases a hull design requires a keel to paddle straight, but more often than not they do not.

Core materials have changed much in the last 30 years and that is due mostly to the manufacturers wanting to save money or weight on hull construction. 30 years ago we would have 50 oz's of glass on a kayaks hull just to make it thick enough to support without too much flex. Today, boats are being built with half that weight using high tech core materials which simply did not exist in the 1970's and 80's. Back then Balsa wood was the go to with a good thick mat and a couple of layers of finish glass on each side of it.

Putting a core material which goes from gunwale to gunwale is akin to putting ribs in a boat with thin wooden slats for a hull material. Think about the original adirondack guide boats. They have very thin, in some cases 1/8" planking but they are reinforced with ribs every 6 inches or so which gives the planking the strength it needs. You certainly wouldn't want a 1/8" thick cedar hull without them.

A lot of the advancements in core technology allow us to make high performance canoes and kayaks made of Epoxy instead of Polyester resin and using cloths like Kevlar and Carbon fiber instead of standard s-glass or e-glass. You can find a lot of info on different core materials at Fiberglasssupply.com (http://www.fiberglasssupply.com/Product_Catalog/Core_Materials/core_materials.html)

I have a twelve foot pack canoe that I laid up a couple of years ago in fiberglass, epoxy and core mat which weighs in at a whopping 12 lbs fully decked out. This boat was pulled from a mold give to me by the late great Bart Hauthaway, an early pioneer in composite small boats and someone who I miss and wished I had more time with.

So just a different perspective, hope I didn't offend.

Roderick Gentry
01-09-2014, 4:59 PM
It's OK, I've been building canoe since 79. We are all in a sense working for the OP, and anyone else whose interest might be peaked, so I value all opinions.

Semantics aside, I don't personally want a flat bottomed canoe lake boat, with an external keel and molded in stiffeners of the type shown. That boat is a bit of a puzzle, because a fair amount of care was taken with the hefty wooden bit, but the hull looks like the kind of thing that was sold up and down local HWYs here for about 250 back in the 80s. Those boats are not safe, in the sense that they were built for very undemanding uses and don't give back much to the paddler. Of course in canoes the paddler is responsible for his own safety, and it is all good as long as you can swim out of any trouble you get into. Cores and fancy fabrics, etc... are what I mean by composute, one could say engineered laminates. Of course throwing in a piece of hose and shooting it with a chopper gun is also composite boat building, using a core, etc... I just wouldn't waste any time restoring it. If there are any raw edges, wounds or textures on the inside that would indicate chopped glass, I wouldn't waste my time. I do know one company up here that used to produce boats with a lot of the signatures of the gas station specials, and they were pretty good boats, so one can't be sure just because it ticks a few boxes.

Jack Battersby
01-09-2014, 5:43 PM
Well at the risk of offending literally thousands of our customers, I agree with you in as much as I am not a big fan of the flat bottom lakers, and I always tell my customers that if you have a wooden canoe that needs a keel, then either it is not a very good design or you need to work on your paddling techniques. As you can imagine, I get to paddle a greater variety of canoe designs than the average person does and in all fairness, each design has its goods and bads. Having a flat bottom laker up here in the north to be able to stand up and flycast out of is not very different than having a Pirogue in Louisiana.

That said, I did a design a few years back at the constant request stream from our customers to make a wide, flat bottom canoe which would take the dog, wife, kids and cooler on a saturday afternoon. From the time we started to offer that design it has become our best seller (by far). Frankly, when a customer calls and tells me he wants to be able to take his randy 100 lb lab for canoe rides, the first boat I point them to is the big flat bottom canoe. It may not paddle as fast and straight as some of our other designs, but it has a much better chance of keeping them dry when the dog jumps out of the boat to chase the geese.

Have a good night.

Roderick Gentry
04-04-2014, 6:27 AM
I don't object to flat bottom boats at all. In the canoe world it can be symptomatic of problems in boats that often look like the one up thread.

All the rage at the moment are the stand up paddleboards. Many of those designed for fishing are flat. It depends on the objectives of the design. There is a big difference between designing a flats SUP, for one hopes, semi-competent people, and the stuff they churned out for cottagers in the 70s.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8259/8894214125_4e42e60816_c.jpg

Are photos like this allowed?