Shenandoah Whitehall: Putting it all together

    Obviously, it's been a little while since I've updated this. These pictures are from a while back, so I don't remember a lot of the details. Still, here are some pictures.







At this point, the project was largely a matter of fiddling with all the pieces until they were more or less in the right position. We held it all together with various clamps and straps until we were ready to start gluing. The floorboards, by the way, are 5/8" strips of ash.

Here it is with all the chines in place. All of the joints between the chines and plywood frames are made with thickened epoxy and reinforced with a single silicon-bronze screw. In addition, all the chines except for the gunwales (the top ones) were lashed in place with artificial sinew.Any one of those three connections would probably have been more than adequate, but we're weird that way. Also, I'm sure ordinary galvanized screws would be fine, but Dad wanted to spring for silicon bronze.

You can see the sinew (think waxed dental floss for dinosaurs) here. Dad and I quarreled like an old married couple getting the chines attached to the stem, but it really wasn't that hard. A Japanese-style pull saw made it much easier to cut off the chines at the right angle.

Here you see the inwales, the thwarts (seats) and breasthook (the flat piece in the foreground). The inwales and blocks are same cedars as the gunwales. The breasthook is 1x ash laminated with a piece of 1/2" okoume marine plywood underneath. The thwarts are 1/4" plywood over cedar 1x4s.




After this point, the only thing left to do was skin and waterproof it. We used 8oz polyester and a mix of oil-based paint and polyurethane. We also attached a skeg and a fastened a thin piece of cedar along the keep to protect the fabric from abrasion. I don't happen to have any pictures of any of that, but here's the end product:

Here she is in the water. I'm not an expert, but it's my impression that this is an excellent boat. She's lightweight, fast, and tracks very well. She can also handle quite heavy loads- we routinely pile up to four adults along with a munchkin or or tow, and she still handles quite well.

You can see the that the oarlocks are clamped on; since this picture was taken we've attached them permanently.


One final word: Gentry is right-- building this boat was a lot of work, but you really don't need any special skills to do it. His instructions told us everything we needed to know, and we could have done it with far fewer tools than we had access to. To build one yourself, check out www.gentrycustomboats.com.