Greenvilleguy - Who is he anyway?

Since I've started using this forum and have found it extremely helpful, I thought I'd post something about myself and why I'm asking such basic questions.

First, I'm the opposite of GetAwayMusic4; my primary hobby is furniture making. I know little about boat building.

In 1956, my older brother bought an abused Old Town Canoe from a local amusement park for $10. My dad brought it back to life and I was allowed (as an 11 year old boy) to paint the interior with a spray gun. Bad mistake.

The canoe was used to fish the many small streams in South Georgia that no one else seem to fish. We caught many trophy size bass from the canoe - two over 11 pounds.

In 1970, I claimed the canoe as mine and restored it a second time. For the past 40 years, it's followed me all over the country and served well. Unfortunately, it's suffered from too many fishing trips, too much white water, being pulled across too many logs and too many drops from the car top. When I finish it, I will have replaced 16 ribs, both stems, both sets of gunwales, both seats and about 1/3 of the planking. The jury is still out of whether or not I'll ever be able to strip all of the paint from the interior or whether it will end up painted for a fourth time.

Most of you would be sensible enough to give it a proper burial; but I just couldn't do it -- way too many memories. So here I am, trying to restore it when it would have been much easier to build a new one. I'm not even sure what I'll do with it when I finish.

As a side note, a few years ago; I was able to put together some possible serial numbers from the stems and a very nice gentleman at Old Town helped me positively ID the canoe. It's a 16' Yankee, shipped to Lakeside Amusement Park (where my brother bought it) in 1942. I was able to get the build sheet from this website and I'm very grateful to have it's complete ancestry.

 

Just a thought!

If by chance you painted over the original varnish then it should be fairly easy to strip the paint with good results.

 

Welcome!

Most of us would keep those happy memories alive by keeping the ol' girl going! You'll get plenty of encouragement here... and demands for pictures as you work on her.

Kathy

 

Ditto what Kathy said. Of course it makes more sense to build a new one than it does to fix the old one. But every canoe has its stories. You know your canoe's stories very well; I only know my canoe's stories from the time I was lured to it in an estate sale, and what little the executor could tell me.

Paint can be stripped -- do a search for "Stripping Paint" and you'll see a very recent discussion about the 5 coats on this canoe I'm working on. The environmentally safer stuff is very slow. Methylene Chloride works way faster, but is very nasty stuff. You can quite literally pick your poison; I gave up on the former, and the bits & pieces of time that I have to work on the canoe are showing tremendous progress now...

Oh, and the paint stripping process becomes yet another of your canoe's stories...