MIMI

William Leake likes the look of strip-built canoes but his wife prefers the look of lapstrake canoes. He thought a hybrid model—strip-planked on the bottom half and lapstrake above that—might be the solution to both of them getting what they want. Since he wasn’t exactly sure how this would work, he decided to experiment by building a model first. Taking plans from Chris Kulczycki’s The Canoe Shop and Gil Gilpatrick’s Building a Strip Canoe, he created a set of plans for a quarter-scale model.Starting with a scaled strongback and station molds, he combined western red cedar and white pine strips in building the lower half of the 43″ hull. The lapstraked top half is made from very thin basswood plywood. The keel and stem are made of oak. William scaled the plywood paddle and caned the seat with string. In building the model, he was able to work out any possible construction problems, and now is ready to build the full-size canoe. William Leake took all of these photographs.