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Build a Canoe with Cyanoacrylates Don Duden Natural Experience: Cedar Key, FL
To make Don's 18' Canoe he decided to use Stick Fast Cyanoacrylate Adhesive to make it easier, better, and save a lot of time.
We found there are several areas you can use cyanoacrylate to your advantages and three of these areas we found invaluable. Not only did it make the job easier and better but also saved a lot of time
1. Scarfing the wood strips: Our Canoe was almost 18 feet, therefore, we had a lot (90%) of wood strips to be spliced/scarfed together. This is so much trouble that a lot of canoes are built by just butting the strips together end to end. One would generally use a good carpenters glue like TiteBond and clamp a scarf overnight or at least 6+ hours. We made a simple wooden clamp that aligned the two pieces up straight and put pressure on the scarf joint. A thin layer of Medium cyanoacrylate on one piece a quick shot of Activator on the other - clamp the joint for 10+ seconds and you are ready to use the piece. If it was a strip that had much twist or pressure applied we would give it 2-3 minutes to dry and go to work.
2. Gluing strips to the stems: We found that gluing strips to the stems (bow & Stern) was pretty tricky because of the twist and pressure along with a double angle to clamp to. So we (on the worst/hardest ones) would twist the strip into place by hand, use cyanoacrylate , and hold it until cured. Worked like a charm.
3. Keeping the canoe sides tight on the frames: Most strip canoes are stapled to the frame and the staples later removed prior to fiber glassing. We did not want any staples stains in the canoe therefore we glued and clamped every joint. You can glue each joint and clamp with no serious problems however when you remove all the clamps the tension in the wood will cause it to slightly move away from the mold. To solve this we cut a series of small (2" long) wood strip pieces with a small "V" notch in the side - put a string in the notch and glued (cyanoacrylate on the edge) the pieces inside the canoe at proper angles to each other and simply pulled pressure - worked great!! When we were through and ready to sand we simply pinched the wood pieces out with cutting pliers and proceeded to sand.
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