The flight of the 38 Special

[woodbender]

Sounds terrible doesn't it?

No she didn't come flying off the car racks or fly off in a storm or anything like that. In fact Chris' 38 never got to the water this year.

Due to finances (college tuition and car repair bills etc, etc) in a one income household and cooler weather we simply could not finish this year. With System Three epoxies you can go quite a bit cooler but I'm not flirting with 40 deg temps on our first canoe.

So what the heck do you do when you have an unfinished canoe on the strongback and two cars that need to come in out of the elements? The shop BTW is our attached two stall garage.

Well I was flat against the canoe and strongback going outside no matter how well wrapped it may be. What then? Seems the only place to go was up.

The strongback was supported at three points (legs) when it was on planet Earth so I wanted to mimic that support while it was suspended. Also I needed to ensure that it would not twist while in the air. I basically built a reverse strongback and suspended the original strongback from it by 3/8" threaded rod.

It looks seriously goofy but the strongback is stable and won't twist this way. With the hull at this "rough fair" stage we have had huge swings in humidity and temperature with no cracks or splits or twists anywhere in the hull so I was fairly confident that we could hoist her in the enclosed garage where she'd been built.

So these are a couple of shots of how she looks at the end of the hanging party. Note we don't show any of the shots of Chris and myself in moaning chairs rethinking how the @%&* we're going to do this now that our first idea wouldn't work.


The 38 Special from the side.


Towards the bow looking back.


At the stern looking down the hanging beam.

Hey that last shot shows some of Chris' jointwork on the birdsmouth filling in area. Not bad - no bead and cove - he did it entirely with a handplane.

The canoe is also posted at home.wmis.net/~eastmant/projects.html

[woodbender]

We allllmost got her down last night but had to stop and think things out in our moaning chairs.

We bought some really nice block and tackle assemblies to lower her down but realized at last that the upper strongback keeping everything strait was too close to the bottom chord of the trusses. We can't fit the block and tackle assemblies to the trusses and the upper strongback. So we have to come up with another mounting point.

Blast.

But we did get our ash and cherry gunnels ripped and planed this weekend. We did make sawdust and that after all is important too.

Looking back with hind sight being 20/20 we should have found a heavy duty pulley set last fall to raise her up (and take her down) but just couldn't find any in the Grand Rapids area.

Hopefully we don't have to do this again.

[Vance in Ak]

I wonder if a sheet rock jack or two would lower it far enough that you could get the block & tackle mounted, or maybe all the way down? Just a thought.

[woodbender]

vanceinak said:

I wonder if a sheet rock jack or two would lower it far enough that you could get the block & tackle mounted, or maybe all the way down? Just a thought.

Vance - we almost did that. But I didn't think of the sheetrock jacks. I was considering some screw type lally columns which although they would have screwed the height down they would not have been stable enough to "balance" the entire mess.

The sheet rock jacks have a different base and would probably have done the job! I just didn't have a pair laying loose.

I'll report the landing in another post.