First saran wrap test of the big guy kayak prototype. Brian is 6’2” and 265lbs which is just 10 pounds lighter than my target weight for with this build. He’s not a super experienced paddler so I couldn’t get nuanced feedback, but a saran wrap boat never paddles the same as a normally skinned boat anyways so most of what I’m looking for here is just whether I got the volume right and how the boat is balancing on the water.
Honestly, I’m pretty stoked with what I’m seeing here. The knuckle is just kissing the surface of the water, and the stern is about halfway submerged with the chine just barely sweeping up out of the water in the back. I feel like she might be sitting a pinch high, but we’ll have to revisit that once I get an actual skin on it and some different size paddlers in there.
Going on a hunch, basically what I did here was scale the medium size F1 kayak up by 14%, but I shifted the paddler position and the overall volume of the boat forward 2 inches, which seems to have eased the slight tail drag that I noticed on previous student built proportional scale of this size. There’s no guarantee that boats was built correctly though, so to proof this, I will have to build an exact proportional scale F1 and then do side-by-side testing.
How it actually paddles is anyone’s guess right now. At 165lbs I’m so different than the intended paddler size that it just feels like a sluggish bathtub with me in it. I’m hoping that this kayak will allow larger paddlers to experience some of the F1 magic, but scaling doesn’t always work that way so we’re just gonna have to build some of these and put them in the hands of experienced paddlers for feedback.
Current dimensions are 16’3” x 25.5” although I design with pretty extreme flare so it paddles more like a 24 inch wide boat. It has a touch more rocker than a standard F1, which isn’t something I can correct for without big deviations from the existing F1 building system, so I’m hoping that doesn’t slow it down too much. I might replace my existing 250 pound F1 size with a slightly narrower version of this kayak. Stay tuned…
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
