Don't you love it when....

[Mark Adams]

You are canvassing a canoe, coming up on the stem, and the canvas rips 2 inches short of the stem? 100 bucks in junk canvas, 10 minutes trying to find the hammer after you threw it, and a generally crappy mood the rest of the day.

 

[Kathryn Klos]

... and no particular "lessons learned" either... except perhaps to aim the hammer somewhere easier to find if this situation ever repeats itself.

 

[Dave Osborn]

I feel your pain, Brother!

 

[pat chapman]

Canvassed a canoe in my earlier days and scorched the canvas with a propane torch as directed. Everything was fine until, upon admiring my work, I noticed smoke coming from the opposite side of the canoe. Investigation revealed that canvas doesn't carry a flame very well, but will smolder up the side of the canoe from where a ragged thread caught fire! Many choice words and a laborious patch job later and I was able to salvage the canvas. No one will know until that canoe is recanvassed...

 

[Todd Bradshaw]

That's just a minor annoyance, fueled by your silly sense of craftsmanship and your desire to do good work.

Picture this scenaro:
It's 1971, you're 19 years old and have just signed a contract with Elektra Records and they have just paid you a fairly healthy chunk of money as an advance. It's the first real money you've ever had, so naturally, the first thing you do is go out and order a couple of canoes - one of them is a special-ordered 16' keelless Guide, the other is a decked C-2 whitewater canoe.

After a month or two, they arrive and are gorgeous. About fourteen months pass and when you have time, you're really enjoying using both of them. Then the following spring you notice a split in the canvas about 6" long below one gunwale in the stern seat area. Upon inspection, you find a piece of Dacron sailcloth that formerly was glued-in, behind the canvas, to patch the split. Since glue doesn't stick well to the Dacron and since canvas and Dacron have very different stretch characteristics, the glue has predictably failed, the extra filler over the rip has cracked and the split in the canvas has opened up big-time.

A phone call to the factory tells you that it's out of warranty and that they can re-canvas the boat for about half the price of a new one, if you're willing to pay the freight half-way across the country both ways. Unfortunately, there isn't any internet yet and there are no books on wood canvas canoe building written yet, so you're on your own with no help. You order a roll of new canvas, a gallon of filler, a quart of primer and a quart of enamel. It all arrives and with it is a two-page instruction sheet that starts out "Stretch canvas until tight all around." - and that's about all the help you're going to get.

I won't bore everyone with the rest of the gory details, but consider yourself lucky that you care enough in this case to bite the bullet and fix the problem, rather than to try to hide it, and that you've been able to learn the process from people who know how to do it and are willing to share that information.