Build Sheet For OT 120657 - 15

[Mark Anderson]

Hello,
I'm new to wooden canoes and a new member, but not new to my love of canoes. I recently acquired my first wood/canvas canoes from an existing member in West Michigan.

I'm hoping to obtain the build sheet for the above serial number which I believe is a 50 pounder model. I poked around a bit thinking I might be able to find these for down load from the website, but did not find and it seemed others have been requesting in a post. Forgive me if I should have been able to do this myself. Just point me in the right direction.

Best regards,

Mark

 

[Benson Gray]

Welcome and congratulations, the Old Town canoe with serial number 120657 is a 15 foot long, CS (Common Sense or middle) grade, fifty pound model with open spruce gunwales, oak decks, oak thwarts, oak seats, and a keel. It was built between February and June, 1937. The original exterior paint color was special bright red. It shipped on June 17th, 1937 to Winamac, Indiana. A scan of this build record can be found below.

This scan and several hundred thousand others were created with substantial grants from the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association (WCHA) and others. A description of the project to preserve these records is available at http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/records/ if you want more details. I hope that you will donate, join or renew your membership to the WCHA so that services like this can continue. See http://www.wcha.org/about-wcha to learn more about the WCHA and http://www.wcha.org/store/membership to donate or renew.

It is also possible that you could have another number or manufacturer if this description doesn't match your canoe. The idea of having a "self-service" serial number area on the WCHA site has been considered in the past but never implemented for several reasons. The biggest concern is cost since this information occupies about ten gigabytes of space and we would have to pay our service provider for this every month. Another is ease of use since the raw scans are not very well organized now and it would be a significant effort to rename several hundred thousand files. This project has been started but is far from finished. There is also the issue of compensation. The WCHA and others paid well over $10,000 to build this archive plus thousands of hours of volunteer effort. The current charge is $100 at http://store.wcha.org/Old-Town-Build-Records-on-CD-ROM.html if you want to buy a copy for yourself but this is not likely to ever break even for the organization. Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions.

Benson

 

[Mark Anderson]

Benson,

Thank you for the quick note back and the build sheet. I’m grateful the WCHA took on the task of creating the data base of this historic information. Yes, I did see the description of this endeavor on the website, but have not poked around much other than that yet.

best regards,

Mark