Strip-Built Watercraft |
On Line Manual: |
1: This Is How ... |
There is nothing new about about building boats by stacking strips one upon another. It's a very old method that served skilled one-off and production line builders very well before fiberglass became the material of choice.
| Well into the mid 1950s, very popular wood hulls were being strip-built. They were beautiful boats. A fourteen foot,1954 Pen Yan run about comes back to my shop every couple seasons for renewal work on the varnish. These were production line boats - every single one the same. But the craftsmanship is first rate, the materials top quality. And, contrasted with fiberglass hulls of the same size, weigh much less. |
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Several years ago, I invested two days watching Hugo Gross, owner of Hugo's Boatworks in Isle, MN, strip-build a 14 foot rowboat. Hugo was in his 70s then, and is no longer with us.
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Hugo's mold set up used only a stem, a transom, and one mold in the center. The strips were red cedar, 1/2" thick by 1" wide, each shaper molded with a hollow on one side and a round on the other - what we call bead and cove, and now do with a router. Each strip was edge nailed to the previous two strips. When the hull was stripped, he flipped it over, nailed steam softened ribs eight inches apart in the interior, added the rails and seats, and did the final sanding. Then his wife took over, doing the exterior paint and interior varnish. |
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Hugo didn't use glue between
his strips, nor did he cover any part of the hull with fiberglass - but his craftsmanship
was such that his new hulls never leaked a drop. But when I restored the Penn Yan, the first thing she got was 7-1/2 ounce fiberglass bedded in epoxy below the spray rails. Because traditional strip-built hulls always dry out over the winter, and spout water from every seam when first floated in the spring. |
If you should come upon a traditional strip-built hull in a barn somewhere, your first thought is going to be how beautiful she is going to look after you've restored it.
First look it over very carefully. They made junk in the old days too!
Never pay much for these old hulls unless for some reason they are rare. Free for the taking is the right price.
And then be willing to spend at least three times as long restoring it than you would if you just took off the lines and strip-built the hull the way described in these pages.
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This is how we
are going to build our strip-built boat. Of course we have to find a plan for the canoe, kayak, rowing hull, sail boat, or whatever. If that plan is free, we can expect to do a little drawing work to get the shapes of our molds, stems and such. We'll make a platform to hold the molds in the right place, cut the molds from plywood, mount them on the platform, rip a bunch of strips and glue them edge to edge around the molds, sand the hull, put fiberglass on the outside of the hull, take the hull off the molds, sand the inside, fiberglass the inside, mount some rails and seats, and finally varnish her until we can see our reflection in the finish. |
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So how long is it going to take to strip-build a boat, say a 17' canoe? Somewhere between 80 and 100 hours.
Like most things in life, it won't get done until after you start.
And in this case, it starts with a plan.
