Wooden Boat People

By McKenzieDriftBoat.com

The romance of wooden boat work (slight tongue in cheek)

I don't think I've posted a link to a fairly extensive restoration on a Don Hill boat that I did a few years back. It may be instructive to some who are interested. The damage and deterioration I found here seems to be what happens to a lot of boats. This pic below is about the mystique of being a boatbuilder... Special tools and neat dock-boxes..Too bad this trade is mostly a thing of the past now.

Anyhow, if you are interested, you may have to paste the link below for a lot of pics of this restoration project. I was lucky to find a client with a little money who wanted me to take this on for him, though in the end I think my wages ended up around the $8/hr mark after all the time I spent making it right...Still, rewarding and he uses this boat with pleasure and many compliments on the Klickitat River near Hood River, Or.

Don Hanson

PS. Click on any picture in the google+ album to get the caption

https://plus.google.com/photos/112899774170781374478/albums/5601378...

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Permalink Reply by Don Hanson on August 17, 2014 at 10:31am

This post isn't meant to be a comprehensive and well organized treatise on "how-to", nor has any time been put into organizing the photo album, sorry. Not mentioned, however, is that I did replace every gunwhale bolt and acorn nut with proper SS ones, bedded in Dolphinite bedding compound. The ones used by Don Hill, originally, were hardware store zinc, and run in with no 'goo'. They were rusty, loose and rotting in some places. I also re-fastened with SS screws, again bedded in Dolphinite where future removal is anticipated and in epoxy for the ones that will not be removed again..

Also not mentioned is the many many boring hours of tedious sanding involved. Any boat that is finished "bright"...clear varnish or the like...it will always involve a lot more sanding than a boat that has an opaque finish..You simply can not get away with doing a 'quick and dirty' job on a clear finished boat.... unless you use an oil base product like some of the mixes people come up with or a commercial one like Deks Olje (sp?)

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Permalink Reply by AJ DeRosa on August 19, 2014 at 8:09am

Duh,

Nice job! Looks great on the way out of your shop. That was a piece of work. We have done a few of these and it is nice to see another boat saved and back on the river. I believe your wooden skid shoe will last longer than the uhmw. We put glass/epoxy/graphite on the bottoms of all of our boats and they last a long time inspite of dragging them over cobble and gravel at our take out. I do believe that it is the best best bottom out there.

I'm with you on the bright exterior finish. There is just no substitute for elbow grease and many thin coats of the best varnish you can find. We have two bright finished 20'ers that demand some time every four of five years. We put as many coats as we can stand to do and they continue to look great. The fact that they were built by Ray Heater and Cyrus Happy helps tremendously as they were done right to begin with and we just have to keep them up.

Thanks for a look at these boats through the eyes a of a shipwright. I've learned a few things that I didn't know before. You might want to look around for a project boat to call your own. The Klickitat is calling.

Cheers,

da Fat