Mine's like Nick's. The deck replacement theory may be valid. If so, they fooled with the inwales, too. Both Shell Lake and Thompson inwales joined together way before the deck hit the edge of the stem (see Nick's deck photo). On Sprocket's canoe, it looks like the deck is almost the same length as the inwales. My Shell Lake had extra long copper nails holding the outwales to the decks.
What do the seats look like? Thought I saw nail holes on top of the inwales on one of Sprocket's deck photos. Was it a closed gunwale originally? Also seems odd that a Shell Lake made it out east, when so many other builders were already there. But then a canoe from an obscure builder in Maine, made it here to N. Wisconsin (A.R. Daisey). So who knows??
I have not seen a lot of Shell Lake Canoes, but the one's I've seen have had numbers stamped in the stems.
Who else used cleated seats in their w/c canoes?? Peterborough did on rib and plank canoes ala Walter Walker...not sure about canvas covered?
In this game of vintage canoes, unanswered questions far out number the number of answers. Maybe that's what part of the attraction is!?
I'm all done dealing with steel screws on my Shell Lake, as of about an hour ago.......Today I used a plug cutter to cut out the
hated steel screws that broke off or that I cut off on the keel
![Mad :mad: :mad:](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png)