Old Town search

[Tom Little]

Can a person find a build sheet based on the ship to/buyer location. I have an old town with most of its serial number scraped off but suspect it was sold to Camp Warren in Eveleth MN.
Here's what I can make out of what's left of the serial numbers
----85-16
Spruce gunwales, ash seats,thwarts, a

 

[Tom Little]

Ash deck, steel diamond head hardware.

 

[Benson Gray]

Can a person find a build sheet based on the ship to/buyer location.

Not usually, but here is a process known as optical character recognition or OCR that can be used to convert scanned images like the build records into text. It is not very good with hand written information but many of the Camp Warren canoes were shipped after Old Town was commonly using a typewriter to record the destination information. I just used this and found a canoe with serial number 147843 that shipped to this camp as shown below. This number doesn't end in 85 but it was made during the period when galvanized steel was being used for the diamond head bolts. A more comprehensive search will require looking at several thousand records manually. You can get a set from http://www.wcha.org/store/old-town-canoe-company-build-record-archive-2-dvd-set if you want to take this on. I can offer a some image processing tools to help focus the process. Let me know if this doesn't answer your question.

Benson