Canvas sheathing over a wooden framework makes Ned McIntosh’s 9’ dinghy extraordinarily light, at only 35 lbs, yet it remains a versatile tender that is easy and quick to build.
These 9' ×3' 3" symmetrical double-enders have been around for many years. Oddly, they were born in Panama while Ned McIntosh and his wife, Alice, were there in 1942 in their cutter STAR CREST and Ned was working in a local boatshop. Although he first built himself a sharpie, Ned needed a lighter boat to get back and forth from STAR CREST’s mooring. First he tried a folding canvas dinghy, but it didn’t work out. Then came this fixed-frame, canvas-sheathed dinghy, which did work.After Ned devised a sailing rig with leeboards and a small single sail, the boat became so popular that he and friends built about 20 of them. The group—which eventually formed the Panama Yacht Club—had a great time, racing them backwards as well as forwards. (To sail in reverse, Ned tells me, you have to hold out the boom to catch the wind, then steer backwards.) After returning home to his native New Hampshire, Ned continued to turn out many more of these useful little craft. And after he ceased building them, one or two other local builders began turning them out.
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Comments (2)
Very excited to have read this article! I’m currently finishing off a SoF canoe, with canvas skin. The first skin was sealed with a blend of shellac and beeswax, but SoF hulls are more flexible than an earlier cardboard maché version, and the hide crazed. Now I am soaking six layers of Tung oil (middle two blended with tar) into the canvas, after tests of six layers of Linseed in canvas held water for 24 hours. (Canoes and dinghies get pulled from water every night, even on voyages, so don’t need to be waterPROOF.) I also went to Tung oil from Linseed after learning not only that Tung is more water resistant, but linseed oil degrades canvas (One reason art painters seal their canvas with rabbit skin glue).
I was headed out on a wing and prayer and ideas and researching other industries, and a personal limitation of no materials poisonous to the earth. Super relieved to hear boatwrights have been at the technique for years.
Matthew P. Murphy
Very excited to have read this article! I’m currently finishing off a SoF canoe, with canvas skin. The first skin was sealed with a blend of shellac and beeswax, but SoF hulls are more flexible than an earlier cardboard maché version, and the hide crazed. Now I am soaking six layers of Tung oil (middle two blended with tar) into the canvas, after tests of six layers of Linseed in canvas held water for 24 hours. (Canoes and dinghies get pulled from water every night, even on voyages, so don’t need to be waterPROOF.) I also went to Tung oil from Linseed after learning not only that Tung is more water resistant, but linseed oil degrades canvas (One reason art painters seal their canvas with rabbit skin glue).
I was headed out on a wing and prayer and ideas and researching other industries, and a personal limitation of no materials poisonous to the earth. Super relieved to hear boatwrights have been at the technique for years.
Lovely article, Maynard.
from Ned’s second wife, Terry Picard