I have never built a stripper but I have worked with a massive amount of wood in my life, and have steamed a great many skin-on-frame ribs where grain orientation is important. As far as I understand, the strength of a stripper comes more from the glass than the wooden shell.
If you get...
I have friends who have self-sutured with dental floss.
Much more convenient for repair than dental floss is artificial sinew, used in skin-on-frame building and indigi-craft; a sort of waxed nylon megafloss.
I played guitar four hours a day for twenty years, until my wrists gave out. Fly fishing, primitive skills and bushcraft got a decade out of me. Building furniture and fancy cabinets probably has another decade of good work to go.
Now its deer. Firearm culture, especially pistol culture, has...
I have very limited exposure to Ally canoes but I found one this summer. It is an older model 15' boat, weathered but serviceable, and it surprised me by actually being a boat I wanted to paddle. Setup time is probably in the 30 minute range, requires a rubber mallet, and fairly easy for a...
I used a tumpline not an hour ago!
They are NOT for carrying significant weight by people unaccustomed to using them. I've made several, the fanciest a fifty-hour plant-to-product project out of agave, and they are a lot of fun. I have a WWII-era haversack with what's essentially a tumpline as a...
Found an interesting book in the boxes @sweeper gave me called How to Read Water, by Tristan Gooley. I picked it up to flip through with low expectations, thinking - I can already run rivers - but it's a far more interesting and in-depth book. It looks at how water behaves in all aspects, from...
You're smart to worry about contaminants with something like that. What about the tried-and-true USGI canteen/cup combo? A lot of companies have remade it in titanium, and they're hugely popular with the bushcraft crowd.
I don't know if they were entirely crimped, but there was a...
Not my boat, but since we're all talking about solos I thought I'd share the link. I'm canoed-out for the summer or I would snag it.
https://nh.craigslist.org/boa/d/lebanon-solo-canoe/7877326747.html
Cedar ribs would be fragile. Birch bark canoes are traditionally ribbed with cedar, so who am I to say no? You'd have to size up their thickness, which might nullify the weight advantage of using cedar in the first place. They'd probably bend easier than re-soaked oak, too.
If you're going to...
Robert Morris' "Building Skin-on-Frame Boats" is the classic read and a good place to start. Although he is more kayak-oriented, most of the principles translate to canoes. I tried to build several boats out of Adney's "Skin Boats and Bark Canoes" with varied success.
I'm sure there's a way to...