Another example of stem repair
Hi all - I have learned a lot from this forum and wanted to share some progress that has come of it. I started to refurbish my 1972 Chestnut Cruiser this summer, beginning with stripping the canvas and replacing rotted tips (easier said than done!) Damage was not as extensive as I feared but still lots of cut-and-fit, cut-and-fit to mate compound angles. I cut new ash pieces for inwale and stem tips, and made new decks from maple. I went with the "second deck" approach, using scraps of maple flooring for this, which had grooves on the underside which I just left. I did not tenon the stem-to-inwale joint. There is a cleat to strengthen the stem tip splice - this was first screwed into the triangular sub-deck to tie things together. Then the replacement tips were epoxied at the joints and clamped, with wax paper to keep the deck from getting glued. When cured, the sub-decks were screwed from beneath to the inwale tips - on this Chestnut (maybe all?) the deck does not extend to the stem tip.The inwales were a little deeper than the deck thickness so there is a gap between the two "decks" which I didn't worry about. It's tight getting at screws underneath - I used a Milwaukee right-angle drill attachment that worked well, but you need a hex-shank drill bit and countersink. Check that the drill bit is long enough for the screws - you can't just pull it out to make it longer. I'm now running out of weather so have put the canoe inside for the winter, to be continued next summer. Thanks to those who contributed ideas to the forum and to this knowledgebase.
