Contact me at: rrcp@mts.net or by phone 204.878.2524

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Lots of stuff goes on in this shop, located in Lorette, Manitoba.

Primarily it's the building and repair of classic wood & canvas canoes, and the making of premium canoe paddles. I also do custom boat building, composite fabrication, and special projects. A growing passion of mine is the making of classical guitars, I'll post about that, too.


I want to be able to share with my clients the progress of their commissioned work. Later I started thinking that there might be other people who are interested in what goes on inside a wooden canoe shop operated by an artist and a recovering teacher.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me by email, phone, or by post. My mailing address is:

Red River Canoe & Paddle
24249 River Rd
Lorette, Manitoba
Canada
R5K 0Z6




Sunday 9 August 2009

I've wanted a thickness sander for quite awhile. I have a thickness planer, but once you work the wood to less than 1/4" (6mm) it gets scary! Sometimes, depending upon the wood, you can go thinner. I have gone down to less than 2mm, but that was lucky, and it was a low risk situation.

The planer uses blades set while a sander uses abrasive paper wrapped around a cylinder. The blades can really rip apart thin pieces of wood, and if your wood if valuable, then you risk ruining all of it.

I'd been collecting some of the parts for awhile, then I found this old Delta Super 900 radial arm saw at the dump (my second saw find there). With nothing to lose, I brought it back to the shop. It is solid, and already has a great height adjustment mechanism. A bonus is that I can make an open end sander for when I need to run wide stock through.

Primarily, it will be used for guitar parts, so it is wide enough for that.

I'm at the point of making the discs to attach the steel cylinder to the shaft. I don't get a lot of time to work on it, just a bit at a time.

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