Building an International Canoe

How Long?

This project originally started with a sail on an International Canoe in 1999 and a chat with a guy, Martin Herbert, who has built a number of these boats. From there it took me a few months to get the molds from him and to clear out my garage at home. Then university got started again and I had no free time. Next summer I ended up getting an internship position in Ottawa working for Nortel.

watch

This threw a serious kink in the plan since the mold was in Calgary. Two summers later I was back in Calgary to finish up my school and once again too busy to get any boat work done. Then I graduated and moved back to Ottawa. Half way through the summer all my gear and the mold arrived. It took me a couple months to find a garage to rent and at long last I was finally able to start building.

The moral of this story is that big projects always have unexpected twists. This project has taken five years but most of that has been due to life interfering, rather than any construction issues.

Efficiency

There are so many little items to work on with such a big project that there is never much wasted time. When I run out of materials I order more and while I'm waiting I move on to starting the next item on the list.

This means that there are rarely times when you have to stop. Exhaustion is a more common problem. A lesson I've learnt the hard way is to stop when you're tired or you'll just make mistakes that take time to correct later.

Details

I've put together a table of the time involved for each item. On average I've found that I can put in 3 hours a night for 2 or 3 nights during the weekdays and 6 or 7 hours on the weekend. This equates to 16 hours a week at the most. Some weeks last winter 20 hours was manageable. This is with a full time job and plenty of sports activities as well. At times I've burned out and had to take a break, last summer I did very little work.

[TODO Most of these will be moved to the appropriate sections as they are completed, leaving only the Grand Total on this page. Add some more comments after the total at some point.]

Seat
Guts 10 hours
Assembly 2 hours
Top and Bottom (epoxy, routing, sanding) 15 hours
Finishing 3 hours
30 hours
Seat Carriage
Frame ? hours
Slides ? hours
? hours
Final Assembly
Mast Fittings ? hours
Boom Fittings ? hours
Running Rigging ? hours
? hours
Grand Total
Hull 200+? hours
Mast 43+? hours
Boom 30 hours
Bow Sprit 20 hours
Rudder 40 hours
Dagger Board 32 hours
Seat 30 hours
Seat Carriage ?
Final Assembly ?
? hours