The Heartwood School for the Homebuilding Crafts Blogbook

Heartwood instructors Will Beemer, Jack Sobon and Dave Carlon provided over a dozen chapters for a new book, Timber Framing Fundamentals, now available from the Timber Framers Guild here. Covering topics from design, engineering, wood science to raising and rigging and enclosure, the $45, 291-page volume is a comprehensive reference for novices and experienced timber framers. An extensive and handy glossary of terms is also provided.

The cover photo above is from one of Heartwood’s timber framing courses.

Fine Homebuilding features Heartwood

The June issue of Fine Homebuilding  will feature Heartwood’s Will Beemer in their new “Master Carpenter” section, both in the magazine and with videos on their website. The topic will be “Ten Tips for Cutting Timber Frame Joinery” and will share some of the tricks of the trade we teach in our Timber Framing course. Tune in to the videos to see live action of laying out and cutting mortises and tenons and drawboring for peg holes. Will’s favorite tool will also be revealed in the article.

One of the new 2-day Heartwood courses this year is Build a Skin-on-frame Double Paddle Canoe. Instructor Hilary Russell is a Heartwood alum and he’s been teaching boat building for many years. Here’s his take on how he got into the craft:

“I began building skin-on-frame canoes in 1998, after paddling a 10 ½’ Kevlar double paddle canoe for several years.  Built by Peter Hornbeck in his shop in the southeastern Adirondacks, the boat’s low seat made it stable, and its 17 pound weight and compact size, made it easy to portage, car-top, load, unload.
After a few years, however, I wanted a longer boat that would track better and hold more weight, so during a sabbatical from my high school teaching job I built a couple of stitch and glue double paddle canoes – or low seat canoes, as I prefer to call them, since I use single and double bladed paddles. Both boats – Bob Sparks’ Swamp Yankee canoe and Marc Pettingill’s Sweet Dream — worked out well, so well that when I returned to my teaching position, I offered boat building as an afternoon activity, and my students turned out 12 boats.
Next fall, the fall of ’98, I began teaching high school students and adults how to build skin-on-frame canoes.  Today, with over 100 canoes, kayaks and rowing boats behind me, I’m still finding new, interesting ways to build skin-on-frame.  The elegant simplicity of skin-on-frame building makes the process appealing to both the novice and to the experienced boat builder.  And as you will learn when you build your first boat, the straightforward work working, steam bending, and skin stretching are easy, fun and rewarding.

Building Your Boat
With basic carpentry experience, you can build a skin-on-frame canoe in a week.  And when you do, you’ll be performing nearly all of the skills necessary to build any small wooden boat.  You’ll fabricate parts; steam and bend wood; eye-ball the boat’s fair and not-so-fair,  curves; and join gunwales, inwales, stems, knees, decks, ribs, stringers, and thwarts.  You will not have to fit planks or strakes, but you will learn to stretch, fit, and waterproof a skin.  Since you’ll use little or no epoxy, you’ll avoid a messy job and hours of sanding – a process more like auto-body work than to traditional boat building.
Plus, if you want to customize your canoe – make it longer or shorter, wider or narrower, change the rake or height of the stems, make the hull asymmetrical, alter the dimensions and/or the number of ribs or stringers – you can – easily!
If you are apprehensive about steaming, don’t be.  You can tape together a Styrofoam® steam-box in minutes, and steaming is fun and easy – especially if you are using sweet smelling cedar.  With the help of a friend, you’ll install the ribs in three hours.
Lashing the stringers to the ribs is an ancient, decidedly sane, relaxing process that produces a beautiful visual rhythm, and creates much of the boat’s strength through flexibility.  This concept of strength through flexibility runs counter to the false assumption that harder and stiffer is necessarily stronger.  After all, the strongest skinboats are inflatable that bounce through rock-strewn rivers and heavy seas.  The boat you will build, rather than cracking, scraping, or scratching when it hits a rock, gravel, or a stump, will sound like a ¾ inflated football as it flexes and bounces away out of trouble.
As for skinning, the fabrics that most builders use, nylon and polyester, shrink easily.  The entire process of attaching the cloth and shrinking it takes about two hours.  Waterproofing can take anywhere from two hours to five, depending on the material you choose and the number of coats you apply.

The Origins of our Skin-on-Frame Canoes
I got the idea for these boats while watching Bruce Lemon’s students build baidarkas.  The frames were gorgeous: I was captivated by the smooth repetitions as the ribs grew smaller and the stringers slowly converged at the stem. Sadly, however, this beauty would be covered by the skin!   At that I point, remembering the similar beauty of cedar and canvas canoes, I decided to lash together skin-on frame canoes, where the beauty of the lashed ribs and stringers would remain exposed.
Since I had already decided to have my high school students build Platt Monfort’s double paddle canoe, the Snowshoe 12, it was easy enough to improvise with lashing instead of glue.  I also altered the dimensions and techniques to accommodate other changes –  like northern white cedar ribs in place of ash and hardwood decks in place of plywood ones.
Gaining experience, I looked back past the Platt Monfort’s Snowshoe 12 and the John Henry Rushton’s light double paddle canoes that inspired, among others,  Bart Hauthaway’s fiberglass versions and later Pete Hornbeck’s Kevlar and now carbon fiber boats.  The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North American, Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chapelle helped me think outside the box Western boat building techniques and see my boat as light, practical tools to be built as simply as possible, without losing their pure and elegant spirit.
A photograph of several Ojibway woman lashing together canoe gunwales and inwales reminded me that lashing, which requires a minimum of skill and a lot of repetition, is a great group project that frees one to chat and pass the time pleasantly. Other photos of people building bark canoes, kayaks, and kayak form canoes inspired me to keep my shop spare – after all, these beautiful and functional craft were built outside with only a few tools.  I wanted to produce new, interesting, beautiful boats and not be distracted by acquiring non-essential tools.
In his birch bark canoe building course at the Wooden Boat School Steve Cayard showed me, among other tricks of the trade, how to persuade wood to bend by wrapping it in rags, then repeatedly dousing with boiling water.  More important, he modeled how to do a lot with a little, how to keep things simple, understated.
Paging through Adney’s Bark Canoes, I noted the similarities between the kayak form canoes and modern double paddle canoes:  both are built to be light; both are less deep than high seat canoes and thus suggest a seated position rather than kneeling. Also, both use batten-shaped stringers, rather than full planking.  Since these batten stringers were often not as long as the boat, the builders simply positioned them side by side for a foot or two, rather than scarfing them.  I’ve experimented with both of these techniques, discovering that batten-like stringers, since they reveal more wood than square or octagonal stringers, add to the boat’s beauty, especially when they taper as they approach the ends of the boat.  Also, over-lapping stringers in the middle three or four feet of a solo boat add strength and look good.
Then I turned east to investigate Celtic skin-on-frame construction at the National Coracle Center in Wales and along the west coast Ireland.  As a result of those visits, some reading, and the help of basketmaker Wendy Jensen, I have built have adapted to use of hazel and willow withes for ribs and stringers.  The most useful book on currachs and coracles has proven to be The Donegal Currach, which illustrates building techniques and traces the evolution from the paddled coracle to the rowed currach.  In the past four years my students and I have canoes with both willow and red osier dogwood, doubling the ribs in the Irish style.  Thus in building a modern craft, we have combined ancient yet still practical Native American materials and methods with those of the Welsh and Irish.”

A graduate of our Compound Joinery course in this past August, Stephen Nolin put his newly learned skills right to work, with great results. Nice work, Stephen!