Category Archives: Weird & Wonderful

26' North Canoe

Unconventional Adventure–Building North Canoes

…For an Unconventional Adventure

by Ron Frenette
Epoxyworks 37

Cover Photo: Modern voyagers traverse the water in a 26′ North Canoe.

Canadian Canoes has been building wood-strip epoxy canoes for some 35 years. We’ve produced many thousands of western red cedar canoe strips from clear planks which originated in British Columbia. Eventually, we realized that ripping the strips one at a time then adding on the bead and cove profiles was terribly inefficient. With valuable input from Peter Feindel from Taurus Craco Woodworking Machinery, we used a milling machine to produce consistently accurate canoe strips. What once consumed five hours of monotonous work producing the strips for one canoe now takes about four minutes on the milling machine. This huge increase in production allowed us to offer, along with Ted Moores and Joan Barrett from Bear Mountain Boat Shop, canoe and kayak building kits for home boat builders. Continue reading →

Shelf Life in Real Life

While WEST SYSTEM® epoxy has a long shelf life, age will eventually affect its handling characteristics and cured strength. When stored for very long periods, hardeners may turn darker (reddish to purple), become thicker and give off more odor. 105 Resin may lose some clarity and also become slightly thicker. Use extra care when mixing age-thickened products (stir extra thoroughly), and if color and/or clarity are crucial to your project, buy some fresh resin and hardener for best results. 207 Special Clear Hardener is specially formulated for clarity and flow. Continue reading →

Outdoor Sculpture Sculptor

A Little Less Than Meets The Eye is a 9′ x 7′ x 6′, Fiberglass and polished aluminum sculpture installed at Raleigh, North Carolina, Art on City Plaza. 

by Mike Barker

Bill Wood has been making sculptures since high school. He has a degree in Art from Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas and attended the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri. His work has been featured in shows from Connecticut to Key West and as far west as Topeka Kansas. Continue reading →

Meade Gougeon aboard Yello Thing in the 2010 Everglades Challenge

The Everglades Challenge

A True Aquatic Adventure

By Grace Ombry and Ben Gougeon

Here at the Gougeon Brother’s Boat Shop Meade and Jan Gougeon are preparing for another attempt at the Everglades Challenge, a race Meade calls “A true aquatic adventure.” The expedition-style race covers about 300 nautical miles over a maximum of eight days. It’s a grueling challenge; roughly 40% of starters ever make it to the finish line.

Continue reading →

Replica deer antler rack by Scott Oldanie

Readers’ Projects, Issue 32

Deer antler racks and more

Scott Oldanie has found many unique uses for WEST SYSTEM Epoxy around his Lemont, Illinois, home. These are just a few. He built two whitetail deer antler replica racks, bonded and carved; a wooden bear head attached to the end of a beam; and repaired damaged moose antlers and rotted log ends of his log home.

Continue reading →

Wooden Bicycles, Seriously

By Grace Ombry

Renovo Hardwood Bicycles

Meade Gougeon was intrigued by the Renovo Bikes company of Portland, Oregon after spotting their wares on display at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, Washington last fall. Meade has long been a serious cyclist and understands better than most the value of wood as an engineering material. He saw in Renovo an opportunity to combine two of his great loves, wood, and bicycles. Continue reading →

Zogo, built by French & Webb

Treading Lightly with Zogo

By Grace Ombry

Stephens, Waring & White Yacht Design of Brooklin, Maine, designed Zogo to meet their clients’ concern for treading lightly on their environment. Her owners are longtime summer residents of Stonington, Maine who enjoy low-impact kayaking and rowing around the pristine islands of Merchants Row. They wanted a quiet powerboat with a low carbon footprint to reflect their respect for the waters around Stonington. Continue reading →

The Artistador

Claudia Toutain-Dorbec is a multi-media artist living in northern New Mexico. The Downey Gallery in Santa Fe asked Claudia to create a life-size sculpture in preparation for the city’s 400th birthday celebration which began on Labor Day weekend in 2009 and runs for a year. She created the Artistador, a conquistador who is also an artist, seeking his treasure in art.

Continue reading →

The Lighthouse Project

By Tom Pawlak — GBI Technical Advisor

Bob, my brother-in-law, has a beautiful yard that he has set in a nautical theme. He had been looking at lighthouse plans and asked if I was interested in helping build one with WEST SYSTEM® epoxy. All the plans that he looked at were for flat paneled six or eight-sided lighthouses built with plywood. I was interested in a project that was a bit more challenging and unique, so I suggested we build a stripped plank version. That way the tower could be round and tapered like many of the popular lighthouses around the world and it would differ from the flat-sided variety often seen in people’s yards. Bob liked the idea, so he went online and found photos of lighthouses that he liked. In the end, we based our design on the Marblehead lighthouse located on the southwestern shore of Lake Erie. Continue reading →

project brighter future

Project Brighter World

by John R. Marples

Above: Project Brighter World on demonstration day. The boat performed very well, sailing at windspeed even though it was about 30% heavier (due to the heavy batteries) than the normal sailing vessel design weight. The project was considered a tremendous success.

In early 2007 Impossible Pictures of London, U.K. approached me to participate in a boat demonstration using a Flettner rotor-powered trimaran. They were filming a demonstration for the Discovery Channel’s Project Earth series. Our program would be called Brighter World. Two atmospheric scientists, John Latham and Stephen Salter, had devised the Albedo effect, a way of changing the reflectivity of clouds to deflect some of the sun’s heat, cooling the oceans. It required a flotilla of vessels to seed clouds with small saltwater particles. Our trimaran would be a prototype for this type of vessel. Continue reading →