: I like to fool around with new ideas, and I did some experimenting
: recently to see if Kurt Hughes cylinder molding technique, used
: on several of his trimaran designs, could be adapted to making a
: monohull such as a canoe. It wasn't a total success but I found
: it interesting. Perhaps with a bit more development the bugs
: could be overcome.

: In essence the cylinder molding creates a ply hull by forming a
: multilayer ply sandwich around a cylindrical half-hull form. The
: mold section has the midships profile along its entire length
: and is straight. Two ply sandwiches are made in this fashion
: then trimmed around their edges, forced together along the
: centerline and taped to form a full hull. It only works for very
: narrow hulls, trimaran amas for example, as ply can only be
: tortured so far.

: I tried to adapt it for building a stripper canoe. My method was to
: lay the strips up on the cylindrical form dry, then bend the
: entire thing to create the curve of the sheer in the plan view.
: A coat of thin epoxy would then penetrate between the strips to
: hold the strips together so the half-hull could be removed from
: the mold. I had hoped I could make 2 half-hulls very quickly and
: fasten them together. The dry strips slide against each other
: when bent, and the bending forces are much less than with the
: glued ply sandwich. The hull halves would have held their shape
: and fitted together without much forcing.

: So much for the theory. It actually got quite close to success, but
: although the strips were happy to bend across either their width
: or their thickness, they did not like being bent both ways at
: the same time, so a few strips kept trying to climb over each
: other. I could have used staples to tame them, but I had hope to
: avoid that. Probably narrower strips would have reduced or
: solved the problem.

: Anyone interested, even in a failed experiment, can see more at my
: blog http://theancientkayaker.weebly.com/cylinder-molding.html

This looks to me like one heck of a lot of work to achieve an end result
that is probably not going to look as good as the result from the
conventional stripping method. I admire your patience but Ithink I'll
give it a miss!!

Les C.