Day 10, Skin-on-frame rower-sailer

Day 10, skin-on-frame row/sail canoe. 8 hrs
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Well, today was f-ing frustrating. I banged out the floorboards set the risers and removable seats, planning for spars and foils tomorrow and then on target to barely catch a window of weather warm and dry enough to varnish. Then I got in the boat for a test fit and the foot bracing, which in this case is the planned distance between thwarts, was completely wrong. Like not even close wrong.
.
In the past when I’ve built small rowboats I’ve either followed a plan or mocked everything up and checked it out with my own commonsense but this time I did something different, I was following the fixed seat rowing geometries from a world-class expert rower and row boat builder. I remember reading 26 inches for the foot brace to aft edge of the thwart and thinking ‘that can’t be right’ but I trusted the source because if correct a 26 inch thwart to footbrace distance is exactly double the oarlock to thwart distance meaning the boat could be rowed forward or backwards from any seating position which would be awesome because it would alleviate the rather tawdry challenge of changing rowers on the water in a boat this narrow. It would be an amazing idea if it actually worked. But it doesn’t. That distance is way off.
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if I leave it like this I can still do the pass back-and-forth with the oars, which is really handy. It just means removing the center seat like you normally would anyways. What offends my sensibilities is needing to remove the rear seat when rowing from the center position. There’s nothing actually wrong with doing that and the seat is already removable. I just hate the idea for reasons I can’t explain. It’s almost certain that I’m going to learn something from using this boat exactly as it is that I never would’ve learned otherwise. But it just irks me because I made a ton of design decisions that I would have otherwise done very differently. Had I not gotten seduced by the typo, I would have framed things a lot different so toes just naturally landed on thwarts.
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Day 10, Skin-on-frame rower-sailer. Build time: 8 hrs

Well, today was f-ing frustrating. I banged out the floorboards set the risers and removable seats, planning for spars and foils tomorrow and then on target to barely catch a window of weather warm and dry enough to varnish. Then I got in the boat for a test fit and the foot bracing, which in this case is the planned distance between thwarts, was completely wrong. Like not even close wrong.

In the past when I’ve built small rowboats I’ve either followed a plan or mocked everything up and checked it out with my own commonsense but this time I did something different, I was following the fixed seat rowing geometries from a world-class expert rower and row boat builder. I remember reading 26 inches for the foot brace to aft edge of the thwart and thinking ‘that can’t be right’ but I trusted the source because if correct a 26 inch thwart to footbrace distance is exactly double the oarlock to thwart distance meaning the boat could be rowed forward or backwards from any seating position which would be awesome because it would alleviate the rather tawdry challenge of changing rowers on the water in a boat this narrow. It would be an amazing idea if it actually worked. But it doesn’t. That distance is way off.

If I leave it like this I can still do the pass back-and-forth with the oars, which is really handy. It just means removing the center seat like you normally would anyways. What offends my sensibilities is needing to remove the rear seat when rowing from the center position. There’s nothing actually wrong with doing that and the seat is already removable. I just hate the idea for reasons I can’t explain. It’s almost certain that I’m going to learn something from using this boat exactly as it is that I never would’ve learned otherwise. But it just irks me because I made a ton of design decisions that I would have otherwise done very differently. Had I not gotten seduced by the typo, I would have framed things a lot different so toes just naturally landed on thwarts.