14) Outer Stems

I decided to use cherry for the gunnels, seats, thwart, decks, and outer stems. The reason is simply availability, the mill in town was only able to order large quantites of ash at a time, it was not worth their time to order 12-15 bdft. for my project. So cherry it is. Before mounting the outer stems I cut 1" off of the bottom of the stem. If you don't do this, when you make the mortise for the outer stem, it opens up a hole in your hull (leading to a potentially weaker joint. Personally, with the fiberglass and epoxy reinforcing the area, I don't think that it is too much of an issue, but I am not going to test the theory with my canoe.

I just ordered my epoxy to join the outer stem to the hull. If you are wondering what I used to glue up the stems... it was gorilla glue. Some people disagree with using this polyurethane glue on canoes, but if it is good enough for John Welsford (http://www.woodenboat.net.nz/Workshop/worksindex.html), it is certianly good enough for me (Side Note: if your a wooden boat junkie, check out John's site at http://www.jwboatdesigns.co.nz/).

As I mentioned above, I had to mortise out an area for the outer stem and then I glued the stem on with epoxy thickened with sanding dust. The outer stems were clamped in place with stainless steel screws. I wanted to remove the screws later, so I covered them with parafin wax. The wax did the trick, no problems.