repair
do you steam gunwales? i need to make a steamer unless i can find someone who does the job
What Canoe?
Paddler 98 what canoe do you need gunwales on? You may be able to avoid steam with most Chestnuts. The sheer is not that bad. Steam bending in not hard to do though. You just need a cheap pine box and source of steam. I use my camp stove and a dedicated clean metal gas can. You only need to steam/bend 3 ft or so of each end around a form.
I’ve seen plenty w/c’s on craigslist
that somebody should take an axe to.
easy skill
LOL…yeah, but that’s an easy skill to master 
Bill H.
Maybe not
I just rebuilt a 12’ glass canoe I just heated a tea pot and poured the water on the ends of the gunwales, they bent easily.
http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g179/sweeper54/Canoe%2012/PC040108.jpg
I think West would argue with you about
the last point, because their epoxy is very impervious to water infiltration. Polyester resin, much less so. Vinylester is intermediate. A lot of old fiberglass over wood jobs were done using polyester.
However, I think your point remains valid. Wood covered by glass and epoxy won’t rot, UNTIL small paddling mistakes create damage that doesn’t look that bad, but allows water to get in and start rot. If I had a woodstrip or a stitch-and-glue boat, I would be very scrupulous about checking for damage, drying it out, and sealing it.
Note, however, that we have a bunch of wooden blade paddles that are covered with glass, some by the company (Dagger, Mitchell, Clinch River) and some by me. These paddles get whacked and banged, and as long as they sit between trips in a dry environment, they are not showing rot at all. The old Dagger did show some rot, because it had a metal tip riveted on over the wood and fiberglass, and that metal tip held water against the disrupted wood so that it stayed wet and rotted.
So, I don’t think the practice of fiberglassing wood boats should be ended, as long as people use the best epoxy resins. But they should watch areas that are damaged, and keels that may hide water infiltration, to prevent rot from developing. That is certainly easy to do with an unpainted FG/epoxy skin than with a traditional opaque canvas job.
Glass
With wood and canvas boats, folks typically only glass the exterior - replace the canvas with glass - one side of the hull only. The problem that can occur in this situation is that water enters the canoe interior and can sit between the planking and the glass. This is less of a problem with a cedar stripper that is sandwiched with glass on both sides.
That being said, there are plenty of wood cedar canoes and Grand Lakers running around with glass on the hull exterior only. Like anything else, it is a care and maintenance issue.