a special order canoe
Old Town 71475 is a 16 foot AA grade (top grade-- but the Ideals were all this grade) Ideal model canoe. (The Ideal is an AA grade Charles River model, with open gunwales and half ribs.) Your canoe has red Western cedar planking. It originally had 30" mahogany decks, and I will post a picture of what that maybe looked like, as opposed to the "short deck" style.
Thwarts and seat frames on your canoe were also mahogany-- AA grade has mahogany gunwales, thwarts, and seat frames.
Your canoe also had a keel and outside stems. The outside stems consist of a piece of hardwood, shaped to fit the curve of the bow and stern. This not only defines the edge of the canoe but protects it from bumping into docks, other canoes and old snags in the river. There was a recent discussion of Old Town OSS and I'll find that link so you can see what they look like.
Original color and design were the same as the 1923 catalog cover. I'll post that, and you can decide which of the two designs they meant... but my guess is the one in the foreground as the other would have been easier to describe as a particular Old Town design in green with black stripe. That's just my guess, however... and you can paint the canoe whatever you want, just as the original owner did. Image of the 1923 cover is courtesy "The Complete Old Town Canoe Company Catalog Collection, 1901- 1993", available on CD from
http://www.wcha.org/catalog/ and
http://www.dragonflycanoe.com/cdrom.htm on the web.
The canoe was originally shipped February 5, 1923, to Rochester, New York.
I'm re-posting some pictures of Benson's, showing an Old Town long deck and an Old Town short deck, so you can see the difference. The long decks on an Ideal were a special order. If you're finishing the restoration yourself, someone here may point you to the mahogany you'll need and how to accomplish the task.
The original thwarts would have been "shaplier" than the ones made by the gentleman who began this restoration. If you choose to make them more like the original, someone with thwarts the age of those in your canoe can send you a tracing. (This is a very helpful bunch!)
The scan of this record is attached below-- click on it to get a larger image. This scan and several hundred thousand others were created with substantial grants from the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association (WCHA) and others. A description of the project to preserve these records is available at
http://www.wcha.org/ot_records/ if you want more details. I hope that you and anyone else reading this will join or renew membership in the WCHA so that services like this can continue. See
http://www.wcha.org/wcha/ to learn more about the WCHA and
http://www.wcha.org/join.php to renew.
It is also possible that you could have another number or manufacturer if this description doesn't match your canoe. Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions.
Kathy
