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




Thursday 14 January 2010

More work on the old Peterborough High End Champlain canoe. Lots of sanding of the old varnish residue, went through a lot of sandpaper and made lots of dust. The trim had been painted over, first red then green. As I sand through the paint on the deck I can start to make out where the Peterborough decal would have been.

I have been disappointed with my humidification in the shop. I have been using an old Vick's vaporizer, it works, but not well. I have been looking a the commercial units available and am not really impressed with any of them. Most higher capacity units are using wicks and fans, but the wicks mineralize pretty quickly and have to be replaced, at a pretty high cost!

That got me to thinking about rigging up a unit myself, using the same basic ideas but using readily available hardware store and aquarium parts. Here is something that I rigged up using supplies that I had a around as "proof of concept". A tub of water, a pump, and a furnace air filter. It is sitting just at the out-feed of my room air filter with the air blowing over it.

It works really well! Time to put together something proper.
I was at my favourite woodworking store today, picking up some glue. They have started a fleamarket table, and I found this on it. I bet hardly anybody else had any idea what this thing was. Its a hot-pipe for bending wood for musical instruments. I had the clerk test it out to see if it worked, it has an electric element inside. It didn't warm up, so they let me have it for free. I think that I can get it to work!

Here is the Peterborough canoe that I am working on. It may seem that I am spending more time on the guitars than on the canoes, but in reality I am just taking more photos of that work.

7 broken ribs to start repairing and rotten gunnel and stem ends. Tomorrow's work...

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