Middle Earth Ranger Forum

This is easily the biggest Christmas present I've ever received!

All kidding aside, it wasn't a gift, so much as just something I've been searching for for every bit of the last year or so...a (near) perfectly straight log, of a specific species, of a minimum diameter.

I got the best of all three.

My in-laws have an ongoing "tree project" on their property for me to take care of over a number of years, and I took down one of the "problem trees" in the last few weeks...a 90' Tulipfera liriodendron (Common name Tuliptree or Tulip Poplar) with a PERFECTLY STRAIGHT bottom 25' or so. This past weekend, I went over to the 13.5' log I selected out of the trunk with all my ropes and blocks and hoisted the (conservatively) 1,800 lb. green log into the air and backed the Father-in-law's trailer under it to haul it to my place...
...and got to work!

At the end of day one, I'm about 1/3 de-barked, with quite a bit to go. Last time I posted a raw piece of wood on this forum, it took me three years to finish that project...and it was a MUCH smaller bit of wood. Fingers crossed this goes MUCH faster. Here goes nothing!
[Brownie points to whoever guesses what I'm doing with this thing]

COOL!!!!


... canoe?

Elleth wrote:... canoe?

Yes ma'am.

Wow awesome! I'm looking forward to this!

I cant wait to see more

Burn or chisel ?

I know they did a similar (tulip poplar) one on Townsend's, but imo my favourite looking dugouts are the ones they make in Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Wishing you luck on this awesome looking project!

Oh, that looks awesome! I love being out on the water and so your canoe will be fun to follow and see how it goes! Watercraft seem to be underutilized in the reenactment scene and I was very happy to see an article on boats in the summer 2020 newsletter.

Peter Remling wrote:Burn or chisel ?

My question as well. I assume you will try to burn it, which is I believe is historically correct for this sort of thing(?)

I’m behind!

First off, we got all the bark stripped off...took about 2.5 hours over a few afternoons. Then, I spent several hours marking out the profile of the space to be hollowed out. These marks were then used to remove the space above the eventual interior of the boat, to expose the eventual upper edge, and give me a flat surface. Lastly, or should I say most recently, I flipped her over (today) and began taking down the fore (right) and aft (left) sections to their eventual shapes. We’re pretty close to ‘there’, though I think I’m going to elongate the bow’s curve just a tad more before we flip it back over and begin to ‘delve in earnest’.

Awesome!

Yup, awesome

Any updates on your canoe?

I forgot to update the forum on this for a bit...I dug pretty thoroughly into the interior, and it's definitely begun to take shape, but I came to a standstill with a lack of specialized tools to help me hollow out some complicated/hard-to-reach parts of the interior, and I'm starting to think I may have to resort to some power tools, which would be noticeably cheaper than buying some insanely priced fancy one-purpose-only hand tools. To be continued.

Have you considered burning it out Greg?