Been away from the shop for a couple days, but I’m back on the pedal powered canoe project and chewing pretty hard on the seating geometry.
My starting point for this is the standard seating geometry from a Hobie mirage because they absolutely nailed the comfort in that boat which is much harder to do than most people realize. I am obsessed with kayak and canoe seating and even small errors can cause serious discomfort.
Basically, I need to get as close to the original seating geometry as possible without interfering with my canoes’ nesting, sailing, catamaran system, structural integrity, and without adding too much complexity or requiring a seat change to switch to normal canoe mode. So no big deal right? 😉
The last one of those is the most vexing because the seating position for pedaling needs to be about 6 inches forward of the seating position for canoeing to balance the boat correctly, but I’m tempted to just leave the seating position where it is and see how things work if I’m popping a little bit of a wheelie in pedal mode because I really want people to be able to switch from peddle to paddle on the water. Also, this stern heavy trim MIGHT make it possible to use this thing without a rudder.
The reality is that it’s impossible to know what’s right here without just building two options and trying them which means that I’m gonna end up with one boat that sucks after putting in a ton of time and work.
This is always the challenge of my kind of work, trying to get to the finished product before I go broke from the prototyping. Sometimes I’ll work on the design for an entire year I have to throw it out at the end because it just didn’t make the cut. There’s no shortcuts, you just have to lay siege to a problem and hope that it waves the white flag before your army runs out of provisions. All right, back to work.
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