Symetry

[Troppo2929]

I am about to pull everything together with the decks and inwales on my first project but before I make that last step, (Fastening the decks), I am wondering how important it is to have all measurements equal to each other. By that I mean, for one example, that the bow stem is about an inch higher than the stern. Plus, in order to make the decks fit flush I modified the shape a bit, one deck is a little wider and a touch shorter than the other. Hiawatha didn't have a Stanley tape measure but the people at Old Town did. How close to exact should I keep the measurements on my half century old canoe?

 

[Benson Gray]

The usual response to these questions includes "It's your canoe..." so it really depends on how much this bothers you. Your canoe may have been built in a factory but it was 'hand made' so there were always some variations. Those differences only increase over time as the wood changes shape. Most people are willing to accept this as an essential element of the character which is part of any antique.

The Old Town Canoe factory had a wood shop as well as a metal shop that built and maintained tools. The wood shop was working to a level of accuracy based on what you could see and feel while the metal shop worked to tolerances that could only be measured with special equipment. There was always a question about what level is good enough. Bub King struggled with this when making their first fiberglass canoe molds in the mid 1960s. A 'fair' curve or 'flat' surface is never perfect so he wasn't sure when to stop sanding. His boss owned a Chevrolet Corvette at the time with a fiberglass body and suggested that Bub go sit in the driver's seat and sight down the hood to see the variations in that surface. He felt that the standard set by General Motors should be fine for the Old Town Canoe Company. The canoe Bub came up with was the winner of the 1966 Grand Prize from the Society of Plastics Industries Reinforced Plastics Division in a competition that included car body parts, rocket nose cones, and many other things made out of fiberglass. It came out better than a Corvette but was still far from perfect.

I wouldn't worry about an inch difference in stem height but it isn't my opinion that counts.

Benson

 

[Larry Meyer]

I posted this before, but . . .

The solution to all this anxiety is something I am waiting for Rollin Thurlow to invent: The Universal Canoe Level.

We have carpenters levels to sort out when buildings are going up level and true and straight, right? So what we need next is a Universal Canoe Level, which I envision as some kind of little widget, that uses GPS, that you can slap down on any part of canoe and right away it will tell you whether that part of the canoe is in the right spot or of out of plumb or asymetrical from its counterpart on the corresponding other part of the canoe. Take all the guesswork out of this business of getting a restoration right back to where it was when it came of the factory.

 

[Greg Nolan]

The small variances you describe will not likely affect performance in any noticeable way -- and even you will not likely be able to discern the 1" height difference once the canoe is on the water. Other people will not likely ever notice the deck difference, and even you will stop paying attention to it once you are engaged in using the canoe -- paddling, camping, fishing, lazing about, and so on. As a general proposition, user canoes do not need museum-quality restoration duplicating original specs down to the last 1/8" -- until Larry or Rollin or someone comes up with a Universal Canoe Level, let the museums worry about those kinds of "perfection."