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Here's a very foreseeable survival situation unique to canoe trippers: You've lost or hopelessly broken your paddle. To stay alive, you must make a new one so you can paddle out. How? For thousands of years our ancestors could and did do this. What are the minimum tools needed to do the job? What are the steps?

It's Ice City here in Northwest Iowa today, and I decided it was a good time to put these Spring clamps together ! I'm not stripping a canoe right now, but if anyone is ? Could you make up some of these, try them out? Then let us Know how they work. I have about $1.50 a piece in them. I purchased the 2" Spring clamps from Menard's, for $1 + tax a piece. The Bicycle inner tube, the narrowest I could find at Walmart, for $3.88 + tax. Each tube yields 11.- 7" pieces. The plastic tubing 1/4"...

Jim Dodd suggested I write up something on making strips with the "Skilsaw Method" .... this will be that something, hopefully useful to some. I first saw this method in a post by Jim Dodd (he doesn't claim credit for it, just passes it along), on the BearMountain builders forum, I had just finished my first canoe and had done my strips for that build on my RAS and it took much sweat, setup and 2 people to get that part of the build done. Keeping the board flat to the cutting guide was in...