greybeard canoes & kayaks

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have the facilities to deal with 16′ strips, so I have to make them out of shorter strips. Enter the scarf joint.

This is the preferred joining method. Our friends at Wikipedia have this picture:

I’ve used a block plane to scarf the strips in the past, but then discovered the following method (which combines scarfing with the possibility of a manicure). I usually use two hands, but one is holding the camera.

I have a little mark on the base of the belt sander to indicate the length and a block to achieve the desired angle. In this way, all of my scarfs are exactly the same. Because I’ve been so picky about keeping the strips together, I end up scarfing the same end of neighboring strips, and this ensures that the grain and color will be more or less the same and will make the joint less evident.

When I’ve scarfed two cedar strips, I glue and clamp the scarfed ends using little clamps that I thought were pretty useless before I realized that they could be used for scarfing. I now know what with canoe building, there’s no such thing as a useless clamp.

Tagged: canoe building, cedar strip canoe, cedar strips, greybeard canoes, stripping