The rain had stopped while we were sleeping, but everything was still wet and muddy outside. Fortunately, we didn’t have much farther to go. Also fortunate was that the tide hadn’t washed the canoe away (though it seemed to have moved — not so much as to have caused the tarp covering it to have lost the rocks on the corners holding it down to the ground, or for the canoe to have escaped from under the tarp, but moved nonetheless).
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We woke up all cleaned up, rested up, and comfortable to a breakfast of overnight oats, before breaking camp and setting back out down the river. The weather was a little cloudier than the day before, and not as windy, but still relatively warm and sunny.

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With the temperature having dropped some overnight, we were treated to a gorgeous (if somewhat chilly) foggy morning to breakfast (the last of the bagel and cream cheese) and break camp in.

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We woke up around sunrise on the 7th, got a weather forecast from the satellite, and set to making breakfast. The planned breakfast was stuffed french toast, and the weather was cooperative enough to let us make and eat it before starting any rain — but not to break camp and get on our way. We had to scurry vulnerable things under our tarp as a strong shower passed overhead, before we could finish our preparations to get on our way. Once underway, we had scattered showers and strong, gusty winds pretty much all day. Fortunately, the winds were consistently tailwinds.

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After a couple of months of planning, provisioning, etc., D and I set out for a canoe trip from Otter Rapids to Moosonee, with an optional side-trip to James Bay. We left Hamilton at about 8 in the morning on Saturday (the 5th), planning to drive all day, pitch a tent in Otter Rapids, and then start paddling on Sunday. We figured on having about 155km to paddle from Otter Rapids to Moosonee, and 12.5 paddling days in which to do it before our return train. That said, we were aiming for 8-9 days to get to Moosonee, and the balance to be free to rest up and maybe get that paddle in to James Bay.
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Although I trusted my measurements (and machining) enough to have cleaned and painted the frame before test-fitting any of the associated components (which also were on the boat, rather than in the machine shop), once the frame was on the boat, it seemed like that had gone on for long enough.

First I tested the fit of the motor (since that’s really what bit me on the prototype):

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So because of the space constraints inside the old frame (and also because availability of suitably sized pieces of metal is sometimes a factor in what I build with), I opted to make the new frame out of 3×8″ rectangular tubing with a 3/16″ wall (instead of the 3×6″ — same wall thickness — that the old frame had been made out of). Even if I’d stuck with the smaller box, the new frame would still have started with a reminder of why I was reluctant to start over until the old frame was truly unworkable: facing is a slow and tedious operation.

A fresh piece of rectangular tubing like this:

needs to be shimmed on the first side (so it won’t bend when clamped or rock on the table when it’s being machined), loosely aligned (I was facing with a fly cutter that had an effective diameter just large enough to cover the face of the tube in 2 passes — but only if the workpiece was reasonably well-aligned) and clamped down.
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So a while back Candy Cane’s Atomic 4 started belching oil-burning smoke, and eventually failed to start. Given the timeline of that failure, it’s a pretty safe bet that the piston rings and the cylinder wall were no longer properly isolating the cylinder from the crankcase, and that the scope of work involved in fixing it would be close enough to a rebuild (also there were enough leaks, loose-fitting couplings, etc.) that it may as well get rebuilt.

I figured that for the cost to order all the parts I’d need for a rebuild, I could probably just get a Moyer rebuild and save myself a lot of time, but that was pretty expensive, and I’d had a hankering to repower to electric for over a decade. As luck would have it, I was soon to learn that I could probably get an Electric Yacht motor for about the cost of a Moyer rebuild — but I could also possibly put something together myself for a few thousand less (assuming that my time is worth nothing — more more accurately, that I’d enjoy the work enough for its value not to be an issue). On top of all this, I’d had an opportunity to take a look at an Electric Yacht motor, and found it to be a remarkably simple piece of machinery: just an electric motor driving a shaft via a belt.
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If this post successfully crossposts to LJ, it will be the last one. Crossposting from my WP blog (kiwano.melon.org) to LJ has been getting increasingly broken and clunky. With the current ToS related departures, I don’t think I have enough readers there to justify continuing with the crossposting. All of my old entries (though not all the comments) were copied over from LJ to kiwano.melon.org via some backup tools back when I started making my posts as crossposts from kiwano.melon.org. Locked posts are still locked on kiwano, and can be accessed by logging in (kiwano.melon.org accepts OpenID credentials, so you LJ/DW/etc. credentials should still work if you don’t want to create a new account).

Anyhow, time to see if the crosspost succeeds and this is my last LJ post, or if my entry a few days ago was is…

Over Christmas, the topic of gifts naturally came to my mind as something that there’s quite a bit to say about. Of course it’s taken me a while to set aside enough time to write these thoughts up (in fits and spurts, here and there — further complicated by the that this topic has proven large enough to need to be split into two posts). An upside to this is that the thought of gifts should once again have divorced itself from anxieties around the sense of obligation that seems to be attached to Christmas gifts. That’s not really the sort of gift I’d like to focus on, preferring to look at day-to-day gifts that may be small, intangible, and further removed from the scope of commerce.
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