White cedar used to be the wood of choice for making strip canoes. Color, weight and cost were all good features. In addition, it worked well with the cheaper, more common fiberglass resin of the times, which was polyester. In recent years people have turned to epoxy resin as it works fine on the western red cedar, which is easier to obtain in longer lengths than the white cedar.

As I understand it, it was kind of a "chicken and egg" (as in which came first?) deal with the eventual switch from white cedar to red cedar, and the switch from polyester to epoxy resins. People tried using red cedar with polyester and got only fair results. Apparently the red cedar is oilier and the polyester resin doesn't stick to it as well as it sticks to white cedar. There is/was a workaround solution to this which involved painting the hull red cedar hull with a sealer (lacquer base) before applying the glass cloth and polyester resin.

David Hazen's book on building cedar strip canoes contains some of the sotry on this. The rest I have gotten from conversations with canoeists.

If you can get white cedar it should be a very nice material to work with. Despite the cost advantage, though, I'd stay with epoxy resins with any of the woods you mentioned.

Hope this helps

Paul G. Jacobson