Flipping the Canoe over

This is probably the only time, flipping the canoe is a good thing. When floating down the river, a flipped canoe isn't all too great. Nevertheless, before the canoe was flipped over, it needed something to hold it when flipped. I know some canoe builders use saw horses, but I didn't want to scratch the bottom of the hull on wooden horses. So generally following the plans to build a cradle, from Ted Moore's Canoecraft, I built my own deviation from it with scraps of lumber from my garage. After the two cradles were built, I unscrewed the stations from the strongback and pulled up on the stern, but it didn't budge. Realizing some epoxy had glued a station #7 to a 2x4, I broke the epoxy bond and the canoe lifted off the frame. It felt weird seeing the underside of the canoe for the first time, since I had become so accustomed to seeing the outside of it. There was a lot of glue and wood filler that had made it's way through the cracks and holes, but, in all, the inside looked really good. It just needed a lot of sanding.