Finishing the Chuckanu
October 22/23, 2015

When last we left the Chuckanu, she was fully skinned - then we got interrupted by the Yard Sail. Our next - and final - steps are to outfit her with the final bits of wood - the rub rail and coaming.

Because we skinned her in two parts (first the bottom, then the top) I needed to figure out a way to tie off the end of the cloth at the stems. I ended up stitching it tightly.

I am going to use a standard Harbor Freight heat gun (watch for sales) to heat and shrink the cloth. We'd pulled the cloth as tight as possible while skinning, but there are still wrinkles.

Whoops, an interruption - three local kids dropped by for a paddle. I put the two boys, Junior and Anthony, in a Tik Tak . . .

. . . and Shea into the Yaquina.

A good, Oregon day for a paddle.

The skin tightened up nicely. All the wrinkles came out. I really like building Skin-on-Frame.

I needed to plane the coaming pieces down to 1/2" thick, but I didn't want sawdust all over the place. I made a dust collector out of a Tyvek suit, it more or less worked. I think I am going to build a cyclonic dust collection system.

Hey, weren't there two of these little monkeys in this boat when it left? Anthony promised me Junior hadn't drowned, he just got into the Yaquina with Shea. I could see them off in the distance, having a pretty tough time of steering as the canoe was now overloaded in the front. I'm not really sure Anthony, Junior or even Shea, really - knew what was going on here. Ah, to be 13 again . . .

Saturday morning started out a little less productive than normal, I'd lost my key. I waited until Geoff showed up, then set him to applying the heat gun to the Chuckanu in hopes of getting the skin even tighter while I drove back to Otter Rock to search for my key.

Note: I did not find my key and re-heating the fabric had no apparent effect, so both activities were a bust.

Geoff and I got the coaming figured out and loosely attached both them and the rub rails for transport. Friend of the Boathouse, Dan W. is getting this boat and he wants to practice his newly acquired painting skills on it, so he'll be permanently installing the rub rails and coaming after the paint job. I let the rub rails run long so he could trim them to suit his fancy.

Oh, that's a purty boat.

Again, since I expect Dan'l to do final fitting of the fiddy bits, I drilled the painter hole so it doesn't touch the boat. My recommendation is to drill a rather large hole (use a pilot bit and drill from both sides so you don't tear out the wood) that goes through the rubrails and the stem. You use the painter a lot, it should be strong.

That's it - Dan'l gets his boat and will paint it up. The next time we see her, she'll be beautiful.