Tag Archives: Construction

Concrete Canoe

Bulkhead & Patch Day 2013

Gallery
  • The canoe wants bulkheads!
  • First batch of mix
  • Trimming bulkheads, and cleaning up
  • Patching the top edge of the canoe
  • Fitting, trimming, fitting, trimming…
  • We started running into a lot of balloons in our trimming…
  • Placing concrete patches
  • Cleaning out the stray foam pieces
  • Edges look good
  • One bulkhead done!
  • Erin: we’re going to need to take like six inches off the top.
    Nick: okay, I’ll just go for it.
    Both: uh, there go all of our air pockets…
  • Bulkhead/swiss cheese
  • We had a couple leftover balloons to put inside popped balloon pockets
  • Mixing another batch of concrete
  • We ended up stuffing the balloon pockets with the foam we chopped off
  • Still mixing…
  • Patching done, ready for bulkheads!
  • Bulkhead patching almost done
  • I guess it could look worse…
  • We still had to place the third layer of concrete on the ends under the bulkhead
  • Wait, our bulkheads are both 6″ too long? … let’s chop them down more…
  • Fitted bulkhead
  • Packing in the bulkhead
  • Placing this goes way faster than the rest of the canoe
  • One down, one to go
  • Starting bulkhead#2
  • One more mix!
  • Cleaning up
  • Finished canoe
  • bulkheads look good
  • And the humidifying setup is reconstructed. DONE.
Concrete Canoe

Canoe Pour Day 2013

Gallery

Photos by Nick Halsey, Erin Khan, and Lance Hill. Click on an image to see it full size and scroll through them.

  • Trimming the reinforcement in the mold
  • Attempting to assemble the (male) mold cutouts…
  • The 2nd layer of reinforcement standing by on the male mold
  • Last-minute mold-cleaning
  • Dry concrete is awaits mixing
  • The madness is about to begin…
  • Frantic concrete mixing
  • Deliberating over bow design
  • Packing the first layer
  • Adding the first section of reinforcement
  • packing the second layer, over reinforcement
  • Thinking break…
  • The canoe team places concrete into the canoe mold during the concrete canoe pour day, 2013
  • Ordering food!
  • Starting to place concrete over the second layer of reinforcement
  • We used some spare bricks to hold the reinforcement in place while we mixed more concrete.
  • Brief break, waiting for more concrete to lay over the 2nd layer of reinforcement.
  • Waiting for more concrete for the last layer
  • Packing in the last layer.
  • The canoe is poured!
  • Now we prep the concrete canoe for curing, a 4-week process in total.
  • We needed the whole team to construct the canoe’s plastic shell
  • The canoe will cure in this sealed, humidified shell for the next week.
Concrete Canoe

2013 Canoe Prep: Mold & Reinforcement

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Finishing up the mold and preparing the reinforcement the night before pour day:

  • The mold after the second stage of sanding.
  • We eventually realized that the mold glue bonded best vertically.
  • Waiting for glue to dry so we can tape the bigger mold chunks together… the cinder blocks help apply pressure to bond the mold
  • Arranging the mold into pour-position
  • The positioned canoe mold is taped together
  • We needed to do some final sanding to account for the adjustments from the mold block positioning changes after gluing
  • Laying out reinforcement
  • We went with two layers of reinforcement, three layers of concrete this time
  • One layer is positioned the long way in two big overlayed strips, the other in seven smaller strips across
Concrete Canoe

Endless hours of canoe-pour prep…

Aside

It actually takes more time to get the canoe ready for pour day than it does to pour it. Excluding the mix design (which obviously takes a lot of effort), preparing the mold is our biggest pre-pour task this year. Once we cut the rough shape from styrofoam blocks, we need to sand them into the more accurate shape, then glue most of the mold pieces together, tape the rest together, and do some final sanding.