Phil's canoe making hobby now a business
Guy Rogers
PHIL Millard builds his amazing wooden canoes in between his numerous responsibilities helping his wife, Sue, run their beautiful little Wilderness B&B, Kingfisher Country House.
Born in Cape Town, Phil went to England as a young man to do a furniture design course and then returned to work in the trade in the Cape for three decades. When he and Sue retired to Wilderness 17 years ago and built Kingfisher, because of the slope of the land, he was able to include a workshop running beneath the whole length of the house.
Looking for "something challenging", he came upon a little book called Canoecraft by Canadian Ted Moores detailing the art of making wooden canoes. Inspired, he started building his own.
Cedar is used to make most of the boat because of it's twin properties of supreme lightness and strength. He buys it through George company Rare Woods and they use to import it from Canada. Now a cheaper but equally high quality cedar is being sourced for him in the Far East.
Using precision machining, Phil cuts grooves in each cedar plank to allow them to fit together like a jigsaw for the hull. Working with the canoe upside down, he lays an epoxy resin cloth over the hull for added strength and then several coats of polyurethane varnish. No rivets are used at all.
He uses ash to make the gunnels, Indian paddles and keel and employs an ingenious method to bend the keel planks around to form the bow and stern.
Props are wedged up against the ceiling and at the other end they force the keel into shape against the plywood mould.
It's still early days for Phil who hopes to expand, but he took his boats to a Knysna woodwork exhibition last year and they attracted enormous interest.
Echoing this, his son Nicholas describes how he and his girlfriend took one of them for a test paddle on the Touw River recently and "people were awed".
As special as they are to look at, Phil is equally proud of their robustness. "They're things of beauty but they're not holy," he says.
