What kind of cedar

[Frank R]

I was recently looking at an old plan for the Scaup, which is a sheerside Barnegat Sneak Box duck boat. I noticed that a lot of the wood used for the structure was 1/2 inch and 1 inch cedar. What was the quality of the cedar used back then? I am sure they did not use the nice western cedars that are used today on strip built boats. Did they use wood that had tight knots or was it knot free? It seems hard to believe that even then they had cedar boards that were knot free. When I see common cedar today it seems like it has too many knots to be useful, even on a cheap boat. BTW: the boat was from the east coast and I live in Michigan.

[Capt Nat]

...Atlantic white cedar (aka juniper or
Chamaecyparis thyoides)

[JimConlin]

Your local Northern white cedar is a fine planking material.

[Bob Smalser]

My uncle built sneakboxes in New Gretna from around 1920 until he stopped working in the 1980's. Like a lot of his contemporaries there, be built boats through 24' or so outdoors on his small marine railway, a seasonal occupation. A Sneakbox or a couple flat-bottomed skiffs were built with what was left over from the summer's main project, and almost never of cherry-picked materials.

All the light cedars....Northern White, Atlantic White or Western Red....are almost identical in properties and will work just fine. Nor are tight knots a problem, just a lot more work. As you lay out your stock, if a knot falls on a plank edge, interferes with a fastener, or falls in the middle of a joint, you simply bore it out and plug it using a tapered plug of matching grain. My uncle used UF resin glue and later resorcinol....you have epoxy which is perfect for the task.