A New Adventure

My brother and I started talking about building a canoe for over a year. It finally began tonight. Apparently being at school puts a dent in your hobbies.

We're building a 18' canoe from some free plans we found online. It's called the DK Touring Canoe. Just google the name and you can see the basic shape of it. For now, it looks like this:

It uses a stitch and glue technique, and fiberglass tape on the seams. Since my brother and I are cheap, we just bought exterior plywood, not marine plywood. We are planning on being very careful when epoxying, to get the whole boat encased in epoxy, so the type of wood shouldn't matter. I've had enough experience with epoxy, so I don't think will be too bad.
Last weekend I was in Raleigh, and picked a windsurfer mast from a friend and drove it up with my civic. It's actually the last mast from the set of 3 of Team RAF's boats of the EC.

After the canoe is finished, we'll make a bracket to clamp onto the gunwales for the mast, like the other sailing canoes around.

We got back from getting the wood around 8:30 tonight, and drew up all the reference lines and one of the bottom sections by 9:30, then my brother had to go to sleep. More to come on the weekend!