Thursday, July 2, 2020

Douglas Fowler Finishes Restoration of Bill Garden Paper Canoe

Time to wrap up the saga of the Mystery Canoe. For those who want to dig back into Earwigoagin to review previous posts, click on the following links:
Douglas Fowler sends along photos of the finished restoration of the canoe model. What a gorgeous sailing canoe! There is no-one better in the World at canoe restorations than Douglas Fowler; just for the simple fact that it is a rare occurrence to come across an individual who is such a perfectionist. Douglas ruminates on wrapping up putting this model back together:
"Well it’s finally done! Probably won’t try this again. Massive amounts of time with the sails causing me particular agony! Didn’t see that one coming. Being made out of paper also added a difficulty factor as well. I’ve had a plexy case made so I’ll close it up tomorrow. Having trouble finding a clear surface to put it on. Still want to have a little plaque made identifying it for the base but that can wait. My sign shop is closed up so I can’t go and design it with them. I enjoyed restoring it and it certainly was a worthwhile project. Maybe someday I’ll build a full size one although probably not out of paper as spec’d. It would be a good one for cold molding out of some type of veneer or even a thin plywood bending panel. At 20’ it would be a good size for this lake. I wonder if a full size one was ever built and if somewhere in the Northwest it still exists? I suspect being made of paper with plywood ribs and bulkheads the chances aren’t very good."








 


3 comments:

Alden Smith said...

What an absolutely stunning little boat. A full sized version would be a whole lot of fun to sail!!

Bursledon Blogger said...

Your original post on this inspired me to build a model boat over winter, not quite finished nor anywhere close to the quality of Doug’s which is fantastic, but very enjoyable,

Hopefully we can look forward to reading about his next project

Max

Tweezerman said...

It turns out Tom Price, see previous post on his drawings, is also a model maker and does superb half models. I've done some slapdash Classic Moth half models when I was fiddling around with the design of Tweezer. Maybe I'll put pics up at some point.