Ranger 15

Product Description

The 15-foot Ranger is a pocket-sized Prospector canoe design from Bear Mountain Boats.

The Prospector is a classic wilderness canoe shape, popular for its load-carrying capacity and manouvrability in white water. The Ranger 15 has the same end shape and highly-rockered keel line as the Prospector 16. With a flattened shallow arch bottom and full ends, the Ranger is stable, strong and a good load carrier. If you are looking for a canoe in the fifteen foot range with some history and good all-round paddling characteristics, this might be the one you are looking for.

The Ranger canoe is constructed using the strip-planking method and sheathed in fibreglass for a light and strong hull without internal ribs.

Ted Moores of Bear Mountain Boats is the author of Canoecraft, the standard reference book for wood-strip canoe building. The book is recommended to accompany the kit or plans. It is packed with tips and techniques and has inspired countless first-time canoe builders around the world.

We currently have a ready-built Ranger 15 canoe for sale in our showroom (the same boat shown in the video below).

Length

4.57 m (15′)

Maximum beam

895 mm (35⅕″)

Beam waterline

855 mm (33.7″)

Beam gunwale

850 mm (33½″)

Bow height

560 mm (22″)

Centre depth

345 mm (13½″)

Displacement

170 kg (375 lb)

Optimum capacity

68-204 kg (150-450 lb)

Draught

100 mm (4″)

Wetted surface

2.49 m² (26.8 sq ft)

Weight to immerse

132 lb/in

Prismatic coefficient

0.550

Weight

20.5-25 kg (45-55 lb)

Keel

Keel-less or shoe keel

Watch us build a Ranger 15 in this one-minute overview video:

Kit

We manufacture our kits to the highest standard using European-grown Paulownia for the planking strips. Uniquely, the strips in our Bear Mountain Boats kits have not only a bead-and-cove profile but also a pre-cut finger joint at each end, making the neat joining of strips even easier for builders at home.

The kit includes:

• Plans
• Instructions booklet
• CNC-cut building forms
• Paulownia strips with bead-and-cove edges and finger joints on both ends
• Ash blanks for decks
• Ash stem strips
• Ash gunwales (inwales and outwales) with scarf joints machined for joining
• Ash thwart
• Cane seats
• Waterproof glue for the strips
• Epoxy resin and activator
• Dispensing pumps
• Digital scales
• Epoxy fillers
• Woven glass fabric on a roll
• Free technical support from a competent builder

Please note that the kit does not include the box beam strongback for mounting the building forms on. You can either use a straight length of suitable timber or order the box-beam strongback we supply.

What else do I need?

Strongback

This strongback is made up of CNC-cut MDF panels that fit together to form a strong and stiff box beam measuring 200 mm × 200 mm and long enough to build the boat.

Plans and Instructions (not required by kit purchasers)

The plans contain sufficient information to make it possible to build the boat from scratch rather than a kit. The plans are printed in colour and include scale plans and full size drawings for all the forms.