Yesterday I finished building the 20-foot canoe mold I’ve been working on since late December. Everyone I talked to said that building a canoe mold is a lot of work, and I didn’t doubt them. After building one, I can say that they were all correct – it was a lot of work. It’s the most difficult project I’ve ever undertaken, but through building it I’ve learned more about canoes that I ever could have gleaned from simply paddling and poling them. Unlike more conventional projects there are very few uses for a carpenter’s square on the mold. Instead, there are curves and compound curves (where it is curving in more than one direction), rocker, and tumblehome. As such you need to do a lot of it by eye and feel because it’s difficult to measure when there are so few straight lines. Now I’m looking forward to buliding a boat on it!

You can see all the photos of the construction in our photo gallery.