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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: St_Bill who wrote (31565)	10/9/2001 7:49:46 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Classic wooden boats is indeed a niche, but should be a profitable one -- those who are into those boats usually can afford to pay for their pleasure. My boating experience was on much smaller craft -- I worked for a couple of summers for a wilderness canoe camp in Canada. We used canvas canoes exclusively, some Old Town, some Chestnut, some various other makers, some that we made ourselves. I was a trip leader, but would come up about a month before camp started to work on the boats. We did all the repairs on them ourselves -- and some of the repairs were significant, in a few cases basically total rebuilding where some kids had gotten themselves turned around in the rapids and crunched on a rock (think Deliverance!) When we had the time we would also build new boats on our own molds. We milled all the wood ourselves, would cut or buy cedar and oak logs, run them through rough milling using basically a glorified chain saw on a stand, store them under cover for two to five years to dry, then cut whatever we needed -- stems, ribs, planking, you name it. All by hand -- we had no power to the camp, and no power tools. It's amazing what you can do with a spokeshave when you have learned what you're doing. I never got really fast at it the way some of those who had been working there 10 or 15 years did, but I could turn out ribs and planking that looked as good as anything that the Old Town machine shop could have turned out. I would estimate that we had to do serious repairs (including recovering -- we didn't like to patch the canvas, didn't hold up well enough) on a third to half the canoes each summer. The rest usually just needed a rib or two or a bit of planking replaced which we could do without having to replace the canvas. We also usually retired 2 or 3 canoes each summer, and replaced them with ones we built. It was, as you say, hard work, but very satisfying. Nothing beats the feeling of taking a boat that you've built entirely by hand and running it down class 3 white water and feeling it run sweet and true.