Information request for Old Town Canoes & help with cryptic serial number

acorn

New Member
I'm looking for information/build sheets on three Old Town Canoes:

(1) 15' Lightweight FOUND on an old post on this forum from >15 years ago—so cool! The poster was musing about selling it, and appears to have done just that to the person I bought it from. It's so exciting to learn a bit more of the story for this boat. Kudos to you all for maintaining this awesome resource.
(2) 18' with serial #236058. There's no canvas or paint, just a wood grain finish that may have been from a later restoration.
(3) 13' that must be a Fifty Pound. The serial number on this one is hard to parse because of backwards/inverted numbers. My best guess is #177237. Or is the "1" both upside down and put on the wrong side of the rest of the serial number? The paint is definitely lighter/cooler than "Dark Green," and closest to "Medium or Brilliant Green" from this 1920s color chart.
Stern end stamp looking over the starboard side (stern is to L):
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Welcome, the Old Town canoe with serial number 236058 is an 18 foot long guide model with fiberglass in place of canvas and a keel. It weighed 77 pounds and was built between October, 1980 and October, 1982. The original exterior fiberglass was left clear to show the natural wood. It shipped on June 2nd, 1983 to location number 156000. I don't have a translation for this. The back side of the card indicates that there was a dark spot in a plank below the stern seat. Scans showing both sides of this build record can be found below.

The third canoe with serial number 732771 is a 13 foot long Trapper model that probably dates from the late 1990s or early 2000s. This is simply a new name for the earlier Fifty Pound model. No build record is available. It should have a hull identification number on the starboard stern just below the gunwale with a two digit year on the end.

These scans and several hundred thousand more 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 https://www.woodencanoe.org/about to learn more about the WCHA and https://www.woodencanoe.org/pricing-plans/join to donate or join.

It is also possible that you could have other numbers or manufacturers if these descriptions don't match the canoes. Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions,

Benson



OTC-236058.jpg



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