In the Winter of 1995 my son and Tom Bonniwell's daughter were in the Christmas play at church together, and I mentioned to Tom that I was interested in helping with a boatbuilding program with kids, not as a vocational program to teach them the boatbuilding "trade" but just to give them the experience of actually building something. Before I knew it Tom had said "The Legacy Program is looking for a focus...let's build boats" and in a couple of weeks, 20 kids who never thought about building a boat were each working on a boat of their own in a double-wide mobile school classroom. We started with a simple kayak design of mine but as soon as I saw Mike O'Brien's Six-hour Canoe I knew that was the boat they should be building.
My part in it was to do the "prep work" in my shop to help them get ready to build...do the table saw work and scarf cutting that we weren't confortable having the kids doing. For the first 2 years all the plywood work was done with a Skilsaw with the scarfs cut with an electric plane, but by the 3rd year I was cutting out the panels and scarf joints on my new ShopBot.
Legacy was a great success for 5 years, with well over 100 boats built by students and lots of good publicity generated for the school system, but unfortunately was killed in a round of budget cuts. The program had made a positive impact on a lot of kids so we're happy that it's been resurrected this Spring. The plywood has been delivered to the shop and this week I'm in the process of cutting parts for 22 Six-Hour Canoes. Once the building starts I'll try to post some pictures, but here's one from the maiden voyage in 1995.
Paddling on the maiden voyage in 1995
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