strip

Last weekend the family and I launched the Freedom for the first time. It wasn’t quite “finished” in that I hadn’t varnished it yet, but I wanted to wait for the weather to cool a bit before spraying the urethane.

The gallery below has some pictures from my trials and tribulations in fiberglassing the inside of the hull. The weave is mostly filled and I’m leaving it like this.

I’m half finished the scraping inside the hull. I would guess I have about 3 hours left on the other side of the hull.

Sunday was sort of a big day for me, as I finally got to take the Freedom off of the strongback.

With the stripping done, the next task was to attach the outside stems. First I trimmed the strips flush with the stem along the leading edge.

With the stems finished I had to touch up the strips prior to the final shaping of the hull. There were two things I wanted to do.

Over a period of a couple of weeks I hit the board hard finished the stripping. Once I rounded the bilge the stripping went pretty fast.

Adding strips to the old canoe is a bit of love and hate. Mostly it’s fun to work and very satisfying to see the shape of the boat come together.

I decided to put some accent strips on the Freedom. For this, I am using a thick band of American walnut with thin strips of Alaskan yellow cedar on either side of the walnut.

With the stems shaped and everything in place, it’s time to start stripping the boat. The Freedom looks like it is quite a straight-forward shape to build and I’ve decided to try out some different techniques for this part of the building process.