NMHA -- Dugout

Dugout Canoe Progress Log

This is a running log of our dugout canoe adventure, with newest entries at the bottom

Summer 2000
Rik camps in Hartshorne Woods with the Fair Haven boy scouts. Tree identification is part of rank advancement. What are those huge trees? Tuliptrees? They are also called yellow poplar and canoe wood. Canoe wood? Yeah, the Indians used them for dug out canoes. Hmmmm.

Fall 2006
Charlie and Rik meet with rangers from Huber Woods and talk about water based programs and Lenapi interpretations. We discuss tuliptrees in Hartshorne Park and making dugout canoes. The rangers are interested.

February, 2007
Tom and Rik are working on the new NMHA website. They decide to make an entry for replica vessels and make one for dug out canoes.

March, 2007
Trustees Walt and Vince are comparing tree company knowledge at the trustees breakfast. Definitely some inside knowledge there.

Early April, 2007
Pat works with Robert Rubistelli of Little Silver Liquors, and hears from Robert that he has to take down a large tulip tree at his house in Long Branch to save his foundation. Pat talks to Walt, and Pat goes back to Robert Rubistelli,and he likes the idea of using the trunk for a good purpose and agrees to get involved. Walt mentions the trunk at a Friday breakfast and the board is ready to jump in. But where to build it? Rik and Charlie had just started discussions with Rosemary Kopka of the Red Bank School Board about possible joint programs.

Late April, 2007
The board contacts Rosemary to see if the Red Bank primary school would like to join in on the project. Everybody at the Primary School thinks this will be a fun project and off we go!

May 15, 2007
After some rescheduling and weather delays the tree is taken down by Becker Tree Service, who took special care to take the tree down in such a way that we ended up with a beautiful log.

May 16, 2007
Jim Hassfeld, owner of Complete Marine Transport, moves the log from Long Branch to Red bank primary school and securely sets the log on some cedar logs in the project location.

May 19, 2007
Rik starts ruminating about how we can get this thing licked and Tom sets up an expanded version of the dugout canoe web page.

June, 2007
Our dug out canoe research turns up some interesting information, but most amazingly, there is an Asbury Press article that tells about the recent discovery of a 1500 year old dug out canoe in Bradley Beach.
Rik meets with Ms. Morana to plan the teacher involvement

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June 22, 2007
Strategy meeting. We had a design/project seminar at one of our regular NMHA meetings at the Monmouth Beach Life Saving station. We had various attendees who provided specialized info. One of the attendees even brought prehistoric tools, inclucing a very rare stone adze head.

July 2007 through May 2008
In a typical project frustration, it turned out to be difficult to sort out insurance for a community event that used tools and fire. Fortunately, through Annie Darrow's and Gayle Horvath's persistence, we were able to work out an insurance arrangement that will allow, at least, a start of the project.

ActualWork

June 14 and 15, 2008
Our first shot at working the log and this is the report for the first two days of work:

June 14, 2008

We set up our tent and trailer next to the log and took out our implements of destruction.

It was a nice hot morning and the tent provided much needed shade.

We had brought quite a collection of tools some of which were:

1     The trusty 16 inch Stihl 026 chainsaw
2     A huge hand chisel (4 inch wide)
3     A Pulaski style landscape ax with a fiberglass handle
4     A draw knife
5     A home made hand adze
6     A converted landscape adze
7     A five pound splitting maul and a splitting wedge

The log still had all its bark and it had grown a 4 foot tree at the thinner end of the log.

Our first task was to remove the bark. We weren't sure if leaving the bark on had been a smart idea, and now we'd find out.

First we beat up the bark with the ax, but the new ax had horrible edges on both the ax and the adze side, and it was basically bouncing off the bark.

Once we got a small piece of bark off we decided to switch to the chisel and this proved to be the right tool for the job. Rik and Gayle had the bark off in about fifteen minutes, some of which came of in huge chunks. The wood underneath varied from having some slight rot discoloration on the upper side to having the feel and moisture of a recently felled tree on the sides.

The wood at the base end of the tree, which we will for now call the stern, had a deep purple color and at first we thought it was rot. There was a tiny little bit of dry rot at the upper end, and it was fun to chop that off with the landscape adze, but once we hit clean wood it quickly became apparent that our tools were too dull or not the right tools for the job.

The draw knife and the chisel had no problem working the wood, but those tools were simply too small for the job.

After the bark came off, the wood was nice and smooth, but the wood was covered with the woody part of buds that were quite sharp. These were buds that were between 1/2” and 2 inches in diameter at the base and about ½ inch high and at some stage would have to be chipped off.

The splitting maul cold make a nice dent in the wood, but simply did not provide enough control for the  shaping of the log.

From the beginning we had decided to work the exterior first and since that mostly involved shaping the ends we started making some plans as to how to go about that. The first and most obvious impulse was to use the chainsaw, but a 50 inch log and a 16 inch blade does not provide the type of control and domination that is needed. To do the rough shaping we decided on a tactic that would involve make checker board type cuts into the wood and then to use a wedge and the splitting maul to knock these blocks off.

This system worked pretty well at getting wood removed at the ends to make the bow and stern taper.

Using the splitting wedge gave everybody the chance to get a feel for the wood. If a wedge was to big it would not split, so it became a fun experiment at finding the right size for the checkerboard blocks.

Both sides would need a considerable amount of wood removal to get boatlike ends. However, the lower end had a large amount of root flare so at that end we would be removing a lot more wood.

At this stage we are not really sure if the purple wood at the stern end is sound, but we decided to simply shape the boat on the purple wood and to later decide if we need to make the boat a little shorter and to remove the purple wood.

As an alternative we could have trimmed the log shorter and avoided the trimming work on the flared end, but at this stage we just were not ready to sacrifice any length on the log.

Around 1200 hours we started to see some shape at the bow and stern, although in sort of a step wise fashion.

On average we had worked with four people for about three hours. Two people would alternate making chain saw cuts at the ends and two people would split off the blocks at the end that the chain saw was not working at.

At the end of the day we packed the tools and other stuff into the trailer and lowered the canopy to the ground and secured one end of the canopy to a trailer wheel and the other end to the wood blocks that we had piled on top of a pallet.

We had made a nice pile of some really nice fire wood blocks. (Maybe we should have a bonfire some time this summer.)

Person hours worked today on the project: 12
Hours so far:     12

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Workers and visitors:

Gayle
Boris
Jake
Vince
Rob G
Rik
Henk
Trudy
Rosemary

June 15

Rik showed up at 730 and started to take the gear out of the trailer.

Fortunately we had done a good job of tying up the canopy, since overnight we had one beauty of a thunder storm.

After raising the canopy Rik spend some time sharpening the tools. It was a joy to get a good edge on the chisel, but the landscape ax required quite a bit of shaping with a file and after stoning it it still did not get a really fine edge.

Both the draw knife and the chisel could be used to shape the rough log with careful and slow cuts, but     those jobs really were more appropriate for colonial pay rates rather than 21st century weekend hobbyists.

The landscape ax was a disappointment on both the ax and the adze side. The fiberglass handle simply did not provide the control that a good wooden handle would provide. Instead the head would have a tendency to bounce rather than bite.

Fortunately Rik had bought a ripping chain and decided to install it on the Stihl to see what it would do.

Oh, the beauty of good tools. This chain is not for beginners, but it really takes a bite. With the ripping chain it was possible to make long ripping cuts which allowed progressive shaping of the ends.

Just a few hours of shaping with one chain resulted a bow end that was really starting to look like a canoe bow (or stern and we'll figure that out later)

Rik also spent some time shaping bumps on the log and making an effort to make a nicely symmetrical canoe. This resulted in a discussion between Jake and Rik as to whether native americans would spend a lot of time ensuring that the boat had a really smooth and balanced exterior shape.

With primitive tools and even with steel axes it is no fun shaping the outside since it is quite difficult to position oneself to get a nice stroke without running the risk of chopping into legs and feet.

The small prehistoric canoe of which we have pictures actually has a very simple bow shape that can  be made with easy strokes.  Other older illustration show blunt bows. Jake theorized that native americans did not have sufficient hydrodynamic  knowledge too make fancy bows, but only a few generations of dug out canoes would provide a builder with enough feed back to figure out that pointy ends would be nice and paddle easier. Maybe there were simply utility canoes and fancy performance canoes.

Anyway, it led to a decision to make decent ends, but not to go overboard in making a beautifully faired canoe.

At 1100 the bow really started to look like a bow and it looks like a few hours on the stern will also provide a good starting point for another pointy end.

Then the question will be should we finish shape the outside? Or maybe we should we should roll the log when we have a basic outside shape and work the inside for a while and work back and forth.

At first this seemed counterintuitive, but at this stage we are really considering it. Working back and forth will give us a better feel for what we, and the wood, are doing.

Person hours worked today on the project: 5
Cumulative hours worked: 17

Workers and visitors today:

Rik
Gayle
Vince
Hannah
Abby
Anne
Jake

Next planned work party will be June 21, 22.
Maybe we should have a solstice bonfire that night and have a guy with a banjo play some songs.

You know what they say: If you hear banjo music in a canoe, paddle faster!

June 21

Lovely day. We set up the work camp again and we used the chainsaw to continue to rough shape the bow and stern. Since we had only one chainsaw, Boris focused on working the hand tools at the other end. Boris' experience for a day's work is a master's thesis by itself, but, in summary, one can fairly conclude that success  with hand tools rests on: persistence, sharp working edges, feeling the wood, the right tools for the right job and improving skills by practice.

Boris focused on smoothing out rough transitions made by the chainsaw and, over time, the one end really started to look like a  hand chopped bow.

Vince, Rik and Rob ran the saw mostly on the base end to get that side shaped.

By the end of the day we had two reasonably pointed ends; but still far from smooth and with some inadvertent cross cuts that still needed to be smoothed our or filled with some epoxy.

Also during cleanup Rik noticed that the top surface of the log (which would be the bottom) had started to develop some checks. This is a little scary since checks in the bottom would provide problems with watertightness.

Person hours worked today on the project: 10
Cumulative hours worked: 27

Workers and visitors today:

Rik
Gayle
Vince
Hannah
Bethany
Abby
Anne
Jake
Charlie
Barbara
B & C grandkids
Boris
Rob

June 22

When Rik arrived in the morning he got a chance to contemplate turning the log.

To turn or not to turn? It seemed counterintuitive, but turning would help us amateurs keep track of both sides and also maybe keep us from doing the wrong thing. We'd probably have to turn the log back a couple of times, but why make beautiful ends and then discover that the beautiful ends were useless because something in doing the inside made the whole project into firewood?

And then that checking on the bottom of the canoe. Once we make some cuts in the top we'll relieve a lot of shrinking/drying stress, and possibly keep the bottom from check cracking.

With the bottom on the bottom, the bottom will also get less sun, which would reduce the drying of the bottom side.

A lot to think about before the first cup of coffee was finished.

And then the decision was made. Rob pulled in with his big truck pulling a backhoe on a trailer.

Why waste the fortuitous appearance of a backhoe? It just would be wrong.

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In no time at all, Rob and Rik finessed the backhoe's limited capacity against tipping loads and rollers and had the canoe right side up.

Once right side up, we securely blocked the log to keep it from rolling, removed the remaining bark and laid out a sheer line.

After rolling it became quite clear that the the butt end should be the bow. It even has two nostrils!

Also turning the log gave us a new perspective on the ends and provided better guidance as to what type of shaping on the ends is still needed.

With the sheer line laid out, we made a rip cut along the sheer line. The chainsaw really liked making this cut and it looks like rough removing wood from the inside could go pretty quick.

Still, we all had to move on to our other Sunday activities. We took down the tent, cleaned up and went home around eleven.

At the next work party we'll start digging a little in the middle.

Person hours worked today on the project: 7
Cumulative hours worked: 34

Workers and visitors today:

Rik
Gayle
Rob
Jake
Rob Jr. and his Mom
Charlie
Charlie's son and granddaughter

More on this project at:
  Dugout Canoe - Main Page
  Technology and Design
  Schedule
  Web Links
  Education Materials
  Photos

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License