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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...

Surely you mean "old-form long-nosed Ojibwai"!

I don't need an excuse to go back to Camden...I don't need an excuse to go back to Camden...

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...

Can I ask your height and weight? Does it oilcan at all?

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...

I just drove an hour or so and picked up my fourth canoe of the summer, a Mohawk Solo 13. It oilcans some, because I'm eight inches taller and probably 30 pounds over the ideal paddler weight for it, but kneeling and paddling from the bow it's a nice little boat. I immediately know it's not my...

You can obfuscate yourself into a cardboard box all you want. But you've already wasted more time on it than it would take to move your little finger off your mouse. ;)

You don't have to have a button to do that. Every platform has a key shortcut. I use a Mac, so my key shortcut is Command+UpArrow. It is field-sensitive, though, so if your cursor is in the reply box, for example, that shortcut will work but it will take you to the top of the reply box - where...

Skin-on-frame is the gospel I preach. If you want to try one I'll give you all the help I can. Anyone can make one, everyone should make one. They are truly the anarchist's canoe.

Not to oversell it, but it was a pretty great canoe. Nope, I worked by eye over sawhorses. I thought about taking measurements before I gave it away, but then how could I blame fate if all went sideways next time? Skin-on-frame is a bit weird; the first few I made, I tried to copy existing...

My favorite - and the best - was my most recent skin-on-frame, it was a really great boat. 40 pounds; you could stand up in it, pole it, portage it, heel it and spin it, and push it faster than I thought a 15-foot hunk of oak and nylon could go. I put maybe 500 miles on it over a few summers. I...

If you can find one, a Mohawk Solo 14 in R84 sounds like it'd be the ticket. In the high hundreds but easily under a thousand used. It's roughly the same dimensions as your Echo, but a little flatter and a little lighter. But honestly - and I know what website I'm on - if I were looking at a...

^This was how I tuned the paddles I made. Take it out, Indian stroke around a little cove or something, and watch how the water moved around the paddle edge while I listened to it. Then take it back to the shop and spokeshave or carve it until it was better. Provided a decent paddle, the best...

This was fascinating, thank you.