Category: Reminiscence

More about my canoe building experience

I forgot to mention a few things in my previous blog entry.

The first is that some years after finishing my canoe, I got the bug to build another one. This time without the mistakes, or at least with new and better mistakes. So I bought the Harrowsmith Press book Canoecraft.
One of the prime reasons I’d wanted to build a canoe in the first place was lusting after the canoes from Bear Mountain Canoebuilders, and this book was written by the owner of Bear Mountain, so I knew it would be good. And it is good. But the most important thing I discovered in that book was that Ted Moores, the guy who built those perfect canoes that I’d coveted for years and years, in describing every detail of his canoe shop, pointed out his “crying chair”. Yes, Mr. Perfection himself every now and then felt the need to sit down, cry about the mistake he’d just made, compose himself and figure out how to fix it. Suddenly I felt a lot better about my own tears.

I don’t know if it was in the version of the book when I used it, but the website for the book I used in the first place, David Hazen’s “Strippers Guide to Canoe Building” has a Builder’s Pep Talk online. The most important part, at least in my experience is:


Soon after that release I realized that not one of my customers ever saw those mistakes. They were usually too overwhelmed by the charisma of the boat and ignorant of what small details composed the multitude of “mistakes” that went into every boat.

Best Christmas Ever

It took a few minutes for it to sink in, but I can’t believe how relieved I am to have my medical back. After I finished posting the initial entry to my blog, I almost cried. I wonder what it’s going to be like when I actually get the piece of paper. I can’t wait for a nice day to go up and remember what it’s like to fly alone again.

More about the Starship

In re: Rants and Revelations: Sad end to a beautiful bird

This month’s Flying magazine has more about the Starship. They don’t mention anything about a limited airframe lifetime. They say that Raytheon/Beech just found it too expensive to keep supporting them. Since they still controlled 30 of the 52 of them, they just bought the rest of them back.

Some impressive stuff about the plane, all of which added up to the ridiculous weight and cost of it:

  • The canard had variable sweep because the flaps caused the center of gravity to move too much.
  • The flight instruments had 16 separate CRTs. It looks from the pictures that it had a separate CRT for every instrument, and then some. They didn’t have multi function displays like they do now.
  • The FAA didn’t entirely trust the void detection methods Beech invented, and made them really overdesign the airframe.

The aircraft never had a airworthiness directive, and nobody was ever injured in one. That’s pretty impressive, even for a plane that didn’t get much use.