A LITTLE EXTRA WORK - A LOT OF EXTRA STRENGTH! Seat risers and plank seats are typical for boats like the freighter canoes and the Adirondack Guide Boat. Seat risers also have a good role to play in canoes with scuppered gunwales. If your boat plans call for scuppered gunwales or if you decided to add them on your own, they significanlty weaken the mounting points for the seats. The seat riser is a way to have your cake and eat it too. Even if your boat plans do not call for them you should consider if they are right for your situation. This is a much simpler operation than you may think however the steps are important. Installing seats in your boat accomplishes more than just giving you a place to sit. In most cases it also helps to pull the boat together from side to side. Basically...

If your boat plans call for a scarf joint, don't panic. Given the right tools, this is a simple job to do. the trick to getting past the anxiety of doing this is to simple get out the tools and do one. The concept of a scarf joint isn't complicated. It is a simple matter of of cutting a ramp on the wood which has a run of 8 times the rise. That is to say that if you are working with 3/4" plywood, you want to have a scarf which is 6" deep. The run can be as much as 12 times the rise and your boat plans may specify the ratio they want you to use. For this article we will focus on plywood scarfing. The concept is the same for dimensional lumber, however there are simpler methods for cutting scarfs in dimensional lumber than there are for plywood. Practicing on inexpensive lumber is a good way...

I decided to give a small chronicle of the building of the family canoe Billington.  When I designed this boat and generated the canoe plans it was by request for a family friendly canoe that would simply give a day of fun on flat water and would allow for the cooler, the dog, the kids and anything else required for a day on the lake without having to worry about getting wet unless it was a choice.  Though on the surface this seems like a simple request, these canoe plans proved to be a design challenge. 

I had been thinking about building a solo canoe for some time now.  We build a number of new designs here every year, and it has been a while since we have done a double paddle canoe.  Over the years, we have been asked if the Little Rob can be made smaller in size.  Although it is possible, it really wasn't desinged for that.  What we needed was a boat that was smaller than the Little Rob but something more substantial than the  classic Wee Lassie.  I have nothing against the Wee Lassie and have the utmost respect for it's desinger (Henry Rushton), but it is a petite little thing and not suitable for most people.  The little Rob is a nice boat but it was larger than what many people need.The Nantucket Sleigh is stable enough to fish the bays and harbors...

For those of you who have dropped by the shop, you know that you can always find at least a couple of boats being built.  We very rarely however build boats for customers.  Most of our builds are either for locals we know or more often than not are given to charities for auctions.  This allows us to keep doing what we love to do (build boats), without having to purchase acres of land to store the boats we have built. Over the last couple of years we have been asked a number of times to shrink our 20 foot Mi'kMaq freighter canoe to an 18 foot version.  Well for those of you who have lofted boats, you know that there is more to it than to simply open a program, squeeze it down a couple of feet and hit the print button. We received a call from a man in Texas a couple of...