Alex Comb
The open form holds special appeal to those who don’t want to build more than one of a single wood-and-canvas design or store a more conventional heavy solid form in the shop or garage.
When European Americans decided to replicate the native bark canoe in the late 19th century, they faithfully reproduced some aspects of the craft while using construction methods that were decidedly different from those used by Native Americans. Not only did they replace the highly prized bark of the paper birch with cotton canvas, but they also inverted the construction process. Natives built the canoe from the outside in. Europeans built the canoe from the inside out, developing a labor-intensive solid form that would withstand the rigors of production building (see WB Nos. 141–143). Indeed, canoe factories have built hundreds of canoes on a single such form.
When I started building wood-and-canvas canoes and boats in the 1970s, I used the solid form but found that it had limitations. For instance, once the form was built, it was very difficult to make significant changes in the boat’s shape. While the Native American could build a canoe any length and any width he wanted with varying amounts of rocker, those of us following the solid-form method were pretty much stuck with the size and shape we had created in the form—a form that took many hours to build and that could not be stored easily when not in use. I wanted a simpler form that would allow for changes from boat to boat.