First canoe frame of 2021! The progress on this boat is agonizingly slow because we are using it to reshoot the video course.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with our canoe building system, 3 years ago a friend bugged me about building a pack canoe until I finally relented and because I’m too lazy to build a strong back I thought I would try to apply my formula-based free-bent kayak rib systems instead.
It took about five boats and a half a trillion test ribs but eventually I came up with a system to predetermine all of the rib lengths and slowly refined it over 15 prototypes that summer. While I was doing this work it dawned on me that I could make the canoes fit perfectly into each other like Russian dolls just by scaling the system. And then came the sails, and the catamaran boards, and at the end of the year I had designed a halfway decent pack canoe.
That winter I was flooded with emails from people asking if the system would work for a full-size canoe. I was skeptical that a free bent hull would stay fair at larger sizes and even more skeptical that I could design anything resembling a real canoe, but I gave it a try and 4 boats I made actually turned out OK. Not great, but not terrible. So the next year I made 5 more which turned out a little bit better, and that brings us to this years builds.
The formula-based shaping system is amazing because it gives me the power to build a huge range of canoe sizes and shapes without a strongback, but also overwhelming because each new size and shape needs to be verified with a prototype.
My students have been hugely helpful with their feedback from the beta version of the course, but I always prefer to take any big design risks myself. On the menu this year is pushing more fullness into the center section of the shaping formula. I went farther than ever on this little hybrid double-paddle/single blade canoe and it didn’t create any problems, which gives me a lot of hope for chasing the holy grail on the next boat: A narrow full size solo single blade with some tumblehome.
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