BANGOR, Maine — The smell of steaming cedar filled the air at United Technologies Center Friday as Joe Lavoie sat in a folding chair, surrounded by curious high school juniors and seniors.
Lavoie reached into the steamer, plucked out a thin piece of cedar, and gestured at a 48-inch model canoe in front of him.
“I’m an old man,” Lavoie said, gaining the attention of everyone within earshot. “And I’ve been doing this a long time, at two canoe companies.”
Then the 93-year-old Milford craftsman turned the show over to his son-in-law, Brian Richard, to explain exactly how Lavoie was going to attach that cedar — a rib of the miniature Old Town canoe — and how the process would progress from there.
Lavoie bent the rib, tacked it in place, and smiled.
“Nothing to it,” he said.
Except there is: Completing a single canoe can take from 40 to 80 hours, and Lavoie honed his craft for 40 years as a professional canoe-builder, first at White Canoe, then at Old Town Canoe. He officially retired 29 years ago, and since then, he has continued perfecting his art at his Milford home, and teaching others how the process works.
At UTC, several classes of students stopped by to watch the brief demonstrations, and some even took a shot at bending ribs and attaching them to his latest miniature model.
Lavoie is using age-old techniques, making canoes out of cedar ribs, cedar planks and canvas. Other modern boats are mass-produced, he points out. His aren’t.
“Anyone could make a fiberglass canoe if they had the mold,” Lavoie said. “This is harder.”
Lavoie’s creations — perfect scale models of actual Old Town Canoe — sell for $400 (30-inch model) and $600 (48-inch model). His daughter, Ann Richard, said they’re typically available at the Old Town Canoe showroom.
George Bergeron, the small-engine instructor at UTC, said students from all specialties can learn valuable lessons from craftsmen such as Lavoie.
“I like to show the students where we came from, and that’s beginning on the marine trade. There’s a lot of history,” Bergeron said. “The wooden craft, I mean, the guy’s a tradesman. I just like to bring it to the students, show them what it was like and where we are today.”
Bergeron said students love to see craftsmen work.
“Just this morning, watching some of my students, they were fascinated at how the wood would bend after you steamed it. They’d never seen that before,” he said.
Two students backed their instructor’s assessment.
Brandon Rios, a senior from Bangor High School, said he was glad Lavoie stopped by UTC.
“I think it was completely amazing. Joe Lavoie, [93] years old, coming here and showing us how to build canoes,” he said. “I knew absolutely nothing about it going down there … I was blown away by the craftsmanship.”
His classmate, Carly Wade of Hampden, said that although she’s studying small engines at UTC, there was plenty to learn from Lavoie.
“You definitely take away an appreciation of how much work and time and effort they’ve put into those boats,” she said. “To put that much work and effort into something is just amazing.”
Wade said she was surprised to learn that building a canoe could take 40 hours or more, and that the techniques Lavoie used were impressive.
“It was pretty cool to see the bends of the wood, and how they do that,” she said. “I feel like I’d snap [the wood]. I wouldn’t be able to do that at all.”
Wade said she might be tempted to try building a canoe, but wonders if she’d succeed.
“I would definitely try it, but I don’t think I’d be able to be committed to do the whole thing,” she said. “I might get a little too frustrated. I feel like I’d break some pieces, definitely.”
Rios said having Lavoie visit added to the class lessons he’s already absorbing. And he said he left the demonstration inspired to mix the old-school craftsmanship with new-school technology.
“It’s just a great feeling to learn something new every day here,” he said. “That was just incredible. Right now, I want to go home and build a canoe on YouTube. That’s just what I want to do.”
