John Owen Woodworks in the USA is now producing kits for the Quick Canoe 155.
This boat is designed to be a real alternative to a basic fibreglass canoe, but will be lighter and usually much cheaper.
Some have built one in very few hours.
I built the Quick Canoe in a day and a half. This is way slower than some of my customers.
It is the first time I have been disappointed building a complete boat this quick.
The risk of high expectations!
But a day and a half with the problems I had is pretty good.
This page compares the two plywood canoes in my range. Both have detailed plans and are simple to build.
The page is to explain the differences and to help potential builders see if one of the boats suits their needs.
Lots of links to pictures, build articles and even videos.
The cla
Another Quick Canoe built in less than a week. This time by Clinton.
He shows how quick and cheap the boat can be. Probably our friends from the Americas can build for about half this price for the same materials quality.
Cliff and PJ live in Warm Queensland and Wintry Tasmania. However they both like to go the the yearly (June) wooden boat festival in tropical Far North Queensland.
This year they decided to build one of my Quick Canoes. They started on Saturday and finished including putting the canoe on the car roof by the following thursday.
They are experienced woodworkers so added some very nice details.
Melanie in the UK wrote to me. She has just bought an old Mirror dinghy and started sailing for the first time.
Problem is that the boat leaks and she doesn’t want to stop using the boat until the end of the season.
I have a philosophy of keeping older boats on the water and not pulling them off for months on end until you have the time to do the job.
So the article here is useful to see what can be done with an old leaky plywood sailing dinghy to keep it going.
It is perfect sailing weather at the moment in the UK and it is better she is out there learning but with the worst of the leaks gone.
With a disciplined approach she should be able to get all of this done in a week or so. The general leaks fixed permanently and the rotted area reinforced so that the boat won’t break.
Fast building was part of the aim of this plan! Also to keep the expense down. Rick surprised me – I was thinking it would take a couple of weekends. The Quick canoe is very simple to build and comes out of three plywood sheets. A very simple plywood canoe It has been designed to be as easy to build as possible while keeping some of the qualities of a good paddling canoe – in particular the ability to track.
Tom has built his MSD Rowboat in Brisbane.
I met up with him recently and we drove down to the coast towing the rowboat to the river at Nudgee. A bit of wind and a lot of current because of all the rain.
Tom has trimmed down the skeg to get the boat to balance nicely in all directions. Before the modification the bow used to blow around – now it behaves nicely.
I took quite a few pictures.
I don’t have a car so how can I go canoe touring? Its something I fell in love with in the USA on Lake Powell.
This is an idea for a simple, cheap, almost throwaway (or give away) canoe. I can get the materials shipped to somewhere on a river, build the boat over a couple of days then go for a paddle.
At the end I can give the boat away or store it for the next part of the trip.
This podcast/mp3 talks about why Australian (and New Zealand) wooden boatbuilding is different from the rest of the world..
Click to listen to the talk. This is the third of three.
This is the second of my talks in the USA. It focuses a bit more on construction and some of the methods that can be used to keep a boat light and simple, but very strong and stiff.
It also discusses how there is a “creep” in boatbuilding and design that increases the weight of boats way over what is really needed for a strong structure.
This talk is the first hour of my exposition on boat building and design. There are two more parts to come. This covers some of the background and design issues. The second is more on the building side and the last is a bit more about why the Australian (and New Zealand) wooden boat tradition is different from the Northern Hemisphere.
You can stream the talks over your internet connection or download them as a podcast.
Astoria Maritime Museum – Now the really cool thing happened. Long had organised for us to see the storage sheds across the road.
Gifted Amateur Boatbuilder Chris Perkins has laboured during some of the most difficult boatbuilding weather to produce the prototype of the new RAID41
First we had a computer drawing
Then pics of a mock up model
Now we have pics from American where one is being built by some young people as part of the Compass Project organisation’s Classes.
The OzRacer is the first boat he has built and Alex is not necessarily taking the quickest way – But he is reporting daily about his building and his ruminations on different subjects.
We have moved much of our activity to the Facebook Groups. See the links in the Menu above. But there are so many great questions asked and discussed on the Oz Woodwork Forums..
Australia now has brilliant kits for the Goat Island Skiff from O’Connor Boatworks.
