For Francis Pimmel, woodworking started as a hobby. Today, he builds scale models of voyaging canoes — often using koa wood — for resorts, museums and private collectors. The work on his website ranges from $130 for a Hawaiian fishing canoe to $3,100 for a model of the Hōkūleʻa.
Pimmel’s canoes are displayed at places like the Four Seasons Resort, Lānaʻi; Kahala Resort and Hotel, Bank of Hawai‘i, Polynesian Cultural Center and museums in New Zealand and Honolulu. He recently exhibited his work at the Made in Hawaiʻi Festival held in August of 2024, at the Hawaiʻi Convention Center in Honolulu.
“When I came to Hawaiʻi I looked around [to see] if anybody is making model canoes,” he said. “I went to Waikīkī and checked various gift shops, art galleries. Nobody was doing that. I couldn’t believe it, so I said: ‘Wow! Let me try that.’”
Before making woodworking a full-time job, he was an art consultant for Christie’s Contemporary Art, London, dealing with art galleries across Germany.
Pimmel got his start in model making when he created a small fishing canoe, which he brought as a sample to Polynesian Cultural Center in Lāʻie. They ordered about 20 of them, he said. To fulfill the order, he asked his sister-in-law, brother-in-law and other family members to join him in the carport of a rental in Mililani, he said. When the landlord complained about noise, he and his wife started house hunting.
“That is how we started, more or less, with the idea of doing model canoes,” he said. “But I was not satisfied. I wasn’t happy with little canoes. I wanted to make scale models, the way they used to be built in the old days. The same way, scaled down in size and replicated with the same components, the same material.”
In 1992, Pimmel boarded the Hōkūleʻa when it was visiting Oʻahu. There, he met Ben Finney, a founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and Wright Bowman Jr., who helped establish the nonprofit Friends of Hōkūle'a and Hawai'iloa, and asked to take photos of the voyaging canoe. That same day, he went home and got a tape measure and asked to board again and started measuring things to build a replica, he said. That was more than 30 years ago.
Pimmel made his first replica of the Hōkūleʻa at the house where he lives today, which includes an indoor and outdoor studio. The initial canoe-building process starts indoors. The hallway leading to that studio includes wood of all sizes, leaned against the wall.
“It makes a lot of noise and a lot of dust,” he said, pointing to the wood and saw and adding with a laugh that he tries not to work on the weekends, so he doesn’t upset the neighbors. “I like what I’m doing. I love it.”
When he makes Hawaiian voyaging canoes, he uses koa wood, he said. But Pimmel also builds to-scale models of other canoes sailing across the South Pacific Ocean, including ones from the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesian.
Currently, Pimmel is working on a double-hulled Marquesan canoe in the outdoor studio. It is his third time building this kind of voyaging canoe. He has spent about five days working on just its two sails, he said.
“At the beginning what inspired me most is the book ʻVoyagers,’ by Herb Kawainui Kāne,” he said. “I said to myself: ʻI want to reproduce the canoes that are illustrated — that he imagined. ’ ”
To see more of Pimmel’s canoes, go here: hawaiiancanoes.com.
Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
