I’m grateful to everyone on the forum has given me excellent and helpful advice my project repairing my mad River outrage. But I’ve run into a bad problem and I need your help again.
My outrage had badly rotting.gunwales and a long crack in the bow of the hole. The first part of the repairs went very well: I followed the instructions of everyone from the forum and also from.terry monville at Gougeon Brothers. The G-flex repair went great, it feels and looks awesome.
Then following the advice from both the forum and from Ed’s Canoes and Northwest Canoe, I bought knockdowngunwales from Ed’s in Vermont (I’m in maine). I assembled the gunnels prepared the Canoe, and began applying the Gunns as instructed starting at the marked center and screwing the inwales and outwales together sandwiching the Royalex between them. This went well, the gunnels came together tightly, but they completely flattened out the distinctive shape of the bow and stern of the mad river outrage.
One of the coolest things about the mad river outrage is the box shaped nose and tail of this awesome older boat. As you can see from the photographs, the ash gunwales completely flattened out the shape making it now into the typical diamond shape of most canoes.
I cannot think of any way to finish the project now and get the original shape back: the bow and Stern thwarts are nowhere close to fitting anymore: it looks like they’re at least 2 inches too long now. Did Mad River bend their gunwales with steam before applying them? You can see the photos of the old gunwales with the distinctive box shape. I know we’re supposed to leave something like an eighth of an inch between the thwart and the hull, but I can’t come up with any way to insert a thwart in the bow and stern that will be under tremendous pressure. I don’t imagine there’s any way to pound it in with a hammer or mallet unless there was some narrow strip of wood I could lay along the hull: but there’s no way this would bring the gunwales back to the original shape. I can’t imagine a mechanical way of doing this such as applying tremendous pressure to bend gunwales and popping a screw through the thwart and gunwale while deforming the bow and stern.
The only solution I can think of would involve creating laminate gunnels with five or six thin strips of wood joined with G-flex: I would hugely appreciate any suggestions on how to get the old outrage shape back with these new stiff gunwales