C-Forum

Ok,

I am in the process of designing my own boat. Whitewater open canoe. I've been thinking about this for years, and a couple months ago I decided to do it. After a lot of swearing and cursing at myself for not paying close enough attention during my math classes back in high school, I have finished my prototype design...on paper. What I am curious about is what kind of materials people are using to carve molds? I am assuming there is some material out there available in large hunks that is moderately easy to carve, shape, and sand. What is it? Where do I order it? How many arms, legs, and potential firstborn children will it cost me? And do they have to be my children, or will any first-born suffice?
Thanking you all in advance!

Rob

I will be following this one closely!!
Cheers

welcome to the world of endless dust.....

I wrote an step by step article on this question some years ago for Rapid Magazine. It is probably available online somewhere, or you could contact Rapid Media for a back issue. It is for a kayak design, however, the concepts are the same.

Ian

1) Check out Ian's article
2) Consider strip-built rather than foam, ESPECIALLY if you are doing an open boat. And there are many, many books on strip built canoes out there. I've designed 3 boats - one chopping up bits of others and adding foam (never doing that again), one using foam blanks (sounded like a better idea than it was, will work, but yes, lots of dust and mess and it is not as easy to get each side as true as you think it would be), and strip built (cut your stations to match your designs and have at it. Easy to test while it is still in the plug stage (unlike foam...) and them modify as necessary.

Searches on "Mentor" or "Maven" will yield information and images on my non-strip built boats (the strip boats are open flat water boats for kids that and are not on the site).

And edit to add - it is cheaper to buy a new boat than build one! As noted below you end up building 3 objects typically (if you want to be able to reproduce them) - Plug, Mold, and finished boat. It is very rewarding, and quite a good learning experience though. Anyone can do it, just take your time and follow ALL safety precautions. A one-off- strip boat MAY be cheaper (you are only building one object - the boat!) IF you do not include your time:)

You usually dont carve a mould. You carve a plug identical to the finished product and then you pull a mould from the plug.

This series of vidoes are helpful and explains the prosess:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf2b5qTdABs

The plug can be made out of anything that is easy to form.

My article talks about a 'useable plug'- skipping the requirement for a mold. The idea here is to try the shape without investing too much time and money. The stripper is also an excellent technique. I designed the Departure using cedar strip as well as part of the Electro.

I'll echo Adam's comments. I've used all three of the methods he describes, and for starting from scratch, I think strip built is the way too go. The Blackfly and Ion were made from cutting up and rearranging other parts of other boats with liberal additions of foam, wood, cardboard, etc, and its very time consuming. The Option was made by carving foam, and to this day, I'm still fighting with it, trying to get it symmetrical. The Octane plug was strip built, execpt for the last foot on either end which was carved from foam, since i couldnt bend the wood into the shape i wanted. It actually made out of materials I salvaged when I finished my shop, strong back and all.

Might want to check out... http://www.amazon.com/Boatbuilders-Manu ... 0897320220" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Images are dated and tech has advanced but its a great source to review / go to to figure out the process.

You might want to look at the search function to check out the "Stink Eye" (Mikey's Sripper - Kaz is now going to make ) and "Woodie" (Jim's Cquirt).

Good luck - Keep us posted as you move forward (to get feedback and to get ideas)!

Right!

Thanks for all the tips, guys! I was hoping someone would say "Oh, its really easy, you just need to get _____"...but I figured that wasn't going to happen. I will post updates on here as I go through the process, knowing me, I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, and someone should get a chuckle out of it. Seriously, thanks again, you guys are awesome!

If you build a cedar strip, here's your resource:

http://www.amazon.ca/Canoecraft-Illustr ... 1552093425

For what it's worth cedar strip is easy but time consuming. Then again carving foam is time consuming as well. There are several of us here who have built wood strip canoes/plugs so there is a lot of expertise for doing this. My main advice if you are stripping is not to get too wrapped up in some of the advice from those that build floating furniture (canoes), you can cheat a lot when building a wood stripper to make it less beautiful but speed to process a lot.

For me one of the strongest arguments for wood stripping is that you define most of your shape with the station forms so things are going to be easier to get symmetrical and to spec, carving is much harder to get unless you have mad skills.

Stripping is also way cheaper.

I've heard that 'stripping' can be lucrative too.

Having used many of the possible methods available for building a plug and the subsequent mold, I'd say that for a canoe, you would want to use a strip build method. That way you could have a "fairly" accurate, fairly light prototype that you could paddle and tweak.

Build a strongback, line up your forms and strip it out.

As far as strips go, you could use cedar, C-Flex, Urethane Foam strips, even cardboard strips. Cover with fiberglass, take the plug to the water, see how it paddles, tweak it until you get it right, polish it, build the mold and you are off to the races...

Cedar stripping makes a very durable plug, but requires some woodworking skills. Foam strips are much easier to work with, and to shape, but are much easier to damage.

thomsonbytheriver wrote:I've heard that 'stripping' can be lucrative too.

Given the typical boater physique, I'd say it might be more lucrative option to ask for money NOT to strip

And thanks to Jeremy for the followup picture - I had been wondering how one would form the blunt entry that most WW open boats have. The strip canoes I've seen all have a very fine entry.

Actually, I guess the question still stands - if you were doing a one-off, how would you form the ends?