: Just wondering if you're building canoes (or kayaks) in your shop classes. I
: did my student teaching in Skowhegan, Maine HS, where students built cedar
: strip canoes. Gil Gilpatrick's book (DeLorme Press) shows them at it.
: Seemed interesting and simple enough, so, like Nick Schade, I bought the
: book and built a canoe first. In the current revenue climate for schools,
: having them to sell or auction off might be a good thing!
The first canoe was a class project. I had Gil's book for years and started to make the forms twice but getting married and building a house and going back to college got in the way. We needed a new table saw a couple of years ago and I though this would be a good fundraiser. I donated the material for the forms and strong back and my dad owns a sawmill so in a round about way he donated the clear cedar. It was a lot of fun. We raffled it off and made a lot of money. I had students skipping other classes to come and work on it and parents volunteering. We have a very small school. 220 students K-12. One nice spring day the track team and golf team were both gone and I asked permission to test the canoe with the students we had left. We are only a couple blocks from Lake Huron so two students carried it to the water. I looked back and the whole student body was following us down to the water like a row of ducks. Everyone took turns rowing around the harbor. Parents showed up to watch and some tried it out. It was great. One of my career students developed an extreme allergic reaction to the fiber glass so we haven’t built another one. Next year.