Building an Atkinson Traveler in Wood/Canvas

[Hugh Conway]

So here's a build report for building an Atkinson Traveler Canoe in Wood Canvas. I'm about to Canvas it so up until that point will be relatively quick. Pictures are of varying quality.

First step: Build the mold. Not many pictures for that. Plywood composite beam to lay things out on, Plywood stations. Planking on the mold is 18mm good quality Baltic Birch plywood ripped to 3/4" wide. Attached with drywall nails, fair mold with a longboard to templates drawn from offsets. Cover mold with thinned linseed oil. Next mark out and add 2.5" wide galvanized steel bands (very helpful to have the source chop with a brake, my supplier charge $20 to cut a 4'x10' sheet). Attach bands with #6 stainless 3/4" FH screws. Installed inwale backers of steam bent oak. Wrap mold in Saran Wrap to prep for rib bending

[Hugh Conway]

Here's the mold and strongback (a 2*6 planned flat and jointed)

(note the pile of ribs in the background. ribstock's Alaskan Yellow Cedar)
Stems are steam bent rift sawn white oak - steamer and mold shown. Took a days+ soaking to get a high enough moisture content for successful bending.

Inwales are bent Sitka Spruce; no steaming.

Slowly ribbing the boat (again, ribs are soaked, stock was quite dry). The secondary strongbacks keep things snugged:

[Hugh Conway]

more ribs:


faired ribs with planking stock (western red cedar). Found 20' pieces of clear WRC so a number of the planks are single, continuous, for the length of the canoe.


canoe mostly planked


canoe off mold with decks installed (sorry, few pics in between). Decks are 8/4 gen mahogany cut down to 4/4 with a crest. Inlay is Holly.


half ribs were added (pictures of half ribs will be added). Then everything was clenched and the planking wetted to remove the dents. Plastic sheet to reduce evaporation

[Fitz]

Very nice. Thanks for sharing!

Fitz

[DDan]

Nice post. I just bought plans - hope to get started in next few months.

[skaraborgcraft]

Please excuse my absolute ignorance of this method, but why are you covering it with canvas? Are the planks you fitted not there for the purpose of keeping the water out? I built an old Percy Blandford double kayak that was canvas covered, that had stringers bent around plywood frames. Is this canoe going to be treated to such a rough life (rapids maybe) that it needs all that framing , timber skin AND canvas?? Lovely craft.

[Cuyahoga Chuck]

Please excuse my absolute ignorance of this method, but why are you covering it with canvas? Are the planks you fitted not there for the purpose of keeping the water out? I built an old Percy Blandford double kayak that was canvas covered, that had stringers bent around plywood frames. Is this canoe going to be treated to such a rough life (rapids maybe) that it needs all that framing , timber skin AND canvas?? Lovely craft.

As you see the wood-canvas canoe is built in layers. The hull gives shape and rigidity but is not tight against water penetration. The canvas which is treated with a filler compound (they used to use white lead to fill the weave) and paint becomes the water barrier.
The wood-canvas has numerous advantages. Because of all the steps required it can be built using assembly-line methods. Altho' that approach is long gone. You don't need long pristeen lengths of the most desirable lumber. And they can be repaired/revitalized over and over.
The disadvantage is you have to have a mold. The mold has to be precise and it has to be sturdy because it suffers from thousands of hammer blows when the planks are nailed to the ribs. Each mold only makes one design and it is one hell of a lot of work to build one if you only desire a single hull. Nonetheless I appluad those that do it.
But a newly built wood-canvas certainly is pretty and they maintain their charm well if cared for.
Thanks for mentioning Percy Blandford. He deserves more mention than he gets. His designs were not sexy by our standards but were well engineered and sturdy. They are still selling those plans.

[Hugh Conway]

Nice post. I just bought plans - hope to get started in next few months.

In retrospect the plans would have been a good purchase. Ended up with the suite of Stelmok books (Building the Maine Guide Canoe, Wood Canvas Canoes, Seliga Canoes) his Wooden Boat articles and hybridized between them. Plans would have saved time. Best of luck! For supplies the form was birch plywood; a single 4'*10' sheet of sheet metal was enough to produce the strips to cover the mold, the sheet metal shop used a press brake for an extra $20 to turn it into strips. money well spent. For canoe stuff DB Gurney sells canoe tacks; Canvas was purchased en bulk from an online tenting supply shop; filler can be made yourself; Marshall's Cover white primer and gloss paint; Northwoods Canoe company for various bolts, tacks, stembands, clinching iron. etc.

skaraborgcraft - Cuyahoga Chuck covered it well. By production total man hours for an old town as far as I can tell from build sheets was less a we ek maybe? They turned them out quick. This shops slower but canoe #2 (ribbed on the form) is much quicker than #1. The planking isn't watertight - WCBG standards are <1/16" gap between planks so definitely not watertight.

Adding some more to this build:

rough tools for stretching canvas - canvas clamps (made from HD doug fir), flat pliers (locking would have saved the wrists), staple gun (the stock arrow didn't penetrate enough - changed up to a powered Stanley model).


used a basketball backboard and a car to anchor the two clamps and stretch it upside down on saw horses. Worked well; be careful of rocking saw horses and it's probably more fiddly, but more flexible


lightly singed canvas


filled canoe. Used the WCHA filler recipe. No cuprinol used (the books recommend clear cuprinol, no longer available, testing of cut cuprinol substitute bleed out on the canvas; didn't like the cuprinol cut in the filler)