A little bit of progress on the West Greenland Kayak re-design. As usual most of what I do here is just staring at things like a bewildered monkey trying to anticipate and avoid all the ways I might be backing myself into a corner. This never actually works, but squinting at measuring devices and scribbling on bits of paper somehow feels like insurance against the inevitable “oh s***!” moments. It’s been really helpful to have the 1/2 scale model of the old boat next to me while I think about things.
So far I’ve moved the back rest deck beam location an inch forward and increased the width of that beam by a half of an inch to leave some width to make a tiny scoop for the vertebrae. It’s a pretty minor modification but makes a huge difference in comfort in a cockpit that has room for a person or a backband, but not both.
I also moved all the ribs forward of the skeg location, (stopping at the foot position) forward 1.5 inches, to make room for the skeg, but also tightening the ribs spacing in the foot area where the heel rib is usually cut out. This increases the support in that area so I don’t have to add an extra weird little rib in the larger scaled sizes. Various deck beams got shifted around a little bit as well.
I spent a long time trying to decide if I could tighten up the rib spacing a little bit for more support in the larger scale sizes, but no matter how I shifted things around it created a problem with the ribs being too close or too far from the end of the boat, interference with the deck beams, or problems with heel comfort for common leg lengths. So I finally just gave up and stuck with the old spacing of 7 inches (I’d rather go 6.5). I still might throw out everything I did yesterday and start over.
So that was the first five hours, and then there was about an hour and a half of actual woodworking. The plunge router make quick work of mortising tasks.
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