RandKL's
GI Joe Modeling Page
Snowshoes


An easy and extremily relaxing project....one that while obviously not being needed for every figure, will give you a lot of personal satisfaction once mastered. This is one of those projects that you can do while watching tv and such and you can never have too many snowshoes!

This project really ties in to the packframes construction article posted on the site since it's basically the same general idea as making a bent-wood pack frame.

We'll start off by gathering the supplies as usual.

You'll need: We'll only get into the older wood-framed shoes for now since the newer styles are quite a bit different in construction. We'll add the more modern styles to the end of this text at a later date if anyone's interested. (The modern ones are really too simple to need a construction article of course....but if anyone does want one, let me know.)

Let's look at the various styles of frames and get into the history a bit....

(These are five minute drawings and are NOT to scale but I think you can get the general idea.)

#1: A "beavertail" also called a Huron or a Michigan pattern....#2 a simple "box" pattern....#3 a "bearpaw" also called a Maine and New England pattern....#4 an Ojibwa pattern.



The box pattern is 12 x 24 inches in full scale and 2 x 4 inches in 1/6 scale so you can get a rough estimate of the finished size for any of the patterns you choose. The beavertail pattern shown is 2.5 x 6 in 1/6 scale....the bearpaw is 2.5 x 5....the Ojibway is 2.5 x 9.

The Ojibway design is probably the oldest example of a "specific use" snowshoe due to its relatively simple construction. The box pattern shows up throughout history about as much and was even used by U.S. troops as recently as the Korean War even though it is one of the oldest designs. The beavertail is probably the best known snowshoe design and is still one of the best all-around patterns....it's been used in one form or another as long as there have been people in North America. The bearpaw is the newest design....it can be dated to at least the mid 18th century but wasn't really the common design it is today until the mid 20th.

I'll leave it up to you to research your specific figure's needs and to select the appropriate pattern.

Let's get to cutting something!

The simple "box" pattern is by far the easiest so let's start with that one.

You'll need to cut eight pieces of 1/8 x 3/16 x 4 inch basswood....and fourteen pieces that are 2 inches long. We'll be doubling all of the individual pieces and in some cases tripling so you'll need more pieces than it looks in the diagrams.

Why do we double the thin wood and not just use a thicker piece? Well, we'll be steaming this wood to bend it for most of these patterns and thinner wood bends better with less breakage. Also, the finished shoes will be under constant stress from the webbing and layered wood warps less readily.

Now that you've gotten your wood cut, start off by measuring and marking a 4 inch long piece as in the next diagram....mark the exact center, then the exact center of one of those sides. That will be at exactly 2 inches from one end and exactly 1 inch from one end.

Now securely glue three of the 2 inch long pieces side by side to form a piece that's 1/8 thick and just under a hair of being 1/4 inch wide and 2 inches long. That will be the "toe bar"....the heaviest black line just rearward of the marked 1 inch you measured. Do the same step again to make the "step bar".

Now we come to the first drilling....on those tripled sticks you just made, measure and mark and drill a hole that matches the diameter of your needle through the entire thickness every 1/8 inch or so. Don't go any narrower than 1/8 inch spacing or you weaken your wood too much.

(One thing the wife told me to point out....non-drilled shoes and lacings were/are as common as drilled ones. You decide whether or not you want to drill yours for lacings!)

We then glue those tripled sticks between two pieces of 4 inch single thickness basswood as in that same diagram. Notice the tripled section (toe bar) is just rearward of the 1 inch mark....that's important to get the right balance in the finished shoe.



Now make four 2 inch lengths of doubled stick....and glue those in for the front and back cross bars in both shoes. Notice they are positioned a bit back from the ends so the side bars extend past them. Be sure to get them square!

Now double the side bars by gluing on one more 4 inch length on each side of each shoe and you're all done with constructing the frames.



Once that's all securely glued and cured, go back and measure and mark and drill a hole through all of the side bars and front and back bars exactly like you did the toe bar. Think tennis racquet. The area between your 2 inch mark and the back of the toe bar is called the "toe hole" and will have no webbing so skip drilling the side bars in that area.

Look back at the first diagrams showing the shoe types to see where the toe holes are located.

Once you get all your holes drilled, lay the shoe down flat on some 400 grit sandpaper and gently sand both sides to be sure it's perfectly flat.

Now we get to the fun part....lacing. This is all trial and error and near impossible to try and describe since every shoe will be different depending on where you drilled the holes....so just keep at it until you get it right. Trust me, they get far easier once mastered!

There are two basic patterns to webbing....the chainlink weave and the zig-zig weave. We'll start off with a basic zig-zag. (The chainlink is exactly what it sounds like....running your webbing directly up and down and looping them around the ones next to them just like a chainlink fence. The zig-zag goes at 45 degree angles and you weave the lacings together like a piece of cloth....over, under, over, under.)

The first thing to do is to thread your needle through the forwardmost holes just behind the toe hole area. Then start at the upper right corner and go at a 45 degree angle to the bottom left. You're going to make a zig-zag pattern heading towards the bottom right corner.



After you get to the lower right corner doing the zig-zag from before, take your needle through the corner hole and then all the way back to the top left corner....be sure to weave the thread over and under as you go.

Now start working your way in a zig-zag exactly as before and head to the top right this time.



Once you reach the top right corner, go all the way to the left bottom corner and start working your zig-zags to the top left corner....once you reach the top left, do the same thing yet again and head to the bottom left corner to complete the pattern.

You do half of the pattern each time and go counter-clockwise....ie bottom right, top right, top left, bottom left. I know it sounds complicated, but it's the only real way to do this that evenly distributes the stress of the webbing and stops warpage. The same pattern of lacing can be used on all of the rounded frame shoes if you just think of them as "rounded squares".

As long as we're here, we might as well do another pattern frame that you can try lacing so let's go for the Ojibway pattern next since it's the next easiest.

Start off by steaming eight 12 inch long pieces of your 1/8 x 3/16 x 24 basswood and bend them over something oval shaped on a tabletop. I used my wife's anti-perspirant and weighted the ends down with five pound blocks of lead. We steam eight of them so we can double them again just like the last pattern.

You *can* do these one at a time but I always find it best to do them all at once so I know they're perfectly even and identical.



Let those cool and dry overnight and glue the ends together and double them so you end up with this....then glue the tripled pieces in as the toe bar and step bar and the doubled rear cross bar. Measure and mark 1/8 inch spacings for your drill and lace it and you're done.



The beavertail works exactly like the Ojibway pattern....just steam your wood and wrap them around a former of some sort that's approximately 2.5 inches in diameter to shape them then glue the tail end together and cross bars in. Remember, food cans make great formers for bending steamed wood!

The bearpaw is slightly different because it has the butted joint which is *very* weak....



You'll want to overlap your ends a bit on your former to make sure the butted ends are properly curved and meet each other flush. Overlap them, and once cooled and dried, slice directly down the middle. The resulting butted ends will fit perfectly together.



Where the two ends of the wood butt together on the back edge of the bearpaw pattern, you then carve and glue a small piece of wood across the joint on the inside of the curve. Once it's all glued and cured properly, you can take a piece of sandpaper and gently round out the inside curve of the reinforcement piece if you want. It's optional.

Once you master the webbing, the rest is so easy that you can turn out a pair of great shoes in as little as an hour. It's mindless work so you can sit and watch tv while you do it and it's so relaxing it'll put you to sleep.

The first pair of snowshoes I ever did, I used two 2.5 inch diameter salt shaker lids layed side by side as the former to hold the steamed wood. They came out totally perfectly oval which wasn't very close to the bearpaw pattern I was shooting for. I then started looking at making formers just for snowshoes and it got a LOT easier. I cut my formers out of 1/4 inch modeling liteply wood and then glued those down to another piece of liteply with wooden pegs to hold the steamed-wood ends. I can now make one pair of each type of shoes all at one time and lace three to five pairs of them in an evening if the wife lets me.

Seriously though....food cans and salt shaker lids are perfect if all you plan to do is one pair. But for more than one, you should consider cutting formers.

So how do we use these shoes we just spent an evening making? Well, exactly as they were used throughout history, of course! Take a Joe-scale boot and butt the toe of the boot against the back of the toe bar and then use twine to tie the boot's instep onto the step bar. With a person's boot located there, it places all of his or her weight squarely on top of the step bar which disipates the downward force over the entire snowshoe area. With their weight located there, their toes are free to extend through the shoe's toe hole to grip the ground if they're climbing a hill.

If anyone wants to see a simple construction article for modern shoes, send me a mail and let me know. You know me....I dislike all things modern (except flush toilets and bandaids) so I won't do them unless someone asks.