Yesterday I talked a bit about my first impressions paddling the new skin on frame canoe: swift and stable enough, with a good balance between tracking and turning, but of course that’s just THIS canoe.
Ever since I released the canoe building course I find it challenging to answer the common questions because unlike every other boat plan, this system gives you control over size and shape.
How wide is the canoe? As wide as you want it to be. How long is the canoe? As long as you want it to be. How much rocker does it have? As much rocker as you want. How stable is it? As stable as you want to make it.
The only definitive things I can really say are that our system doesn’t let you add much tumblehome, it doesn’t work well on really deep canoes, and you will need to find good steam bending wood for the ribs. (Although one student surprised the heck out of me by building one with kiln dried oak.)
Of course not everybody wants to be their own canoe designer, so our challenge here is just to build as many of these as possible so we can give reliable sizing and performance recommendations. I’m sure it will be many years before I can achieve the same kind of granular specificity that I can with my kayak designs, but we’ll get there eventually.
My goal for this year is to get feedback from more full-size canoe builders so I can really solidify my solo canoe sizing recommendations and decide if I think we can build a GOOD tandem with the system.
For this particular build I’m thinking about going with a triple nester. The canoe that fits inside of this will be a hybrid double-paddle/single-blade canoe and the canoe that fits outside of it will be a hybrid single-blade/rowing canoe. I’m really looking forward to that second one because as much as I love my Adirondack guide boats they are huge pain to build and I’m looking forward to having a swift little rowing machine at a fraction of the cost and building time.
As I get into bigger canoes the ability to nest these together has gone from a fun feature to an absolute necessity if we want to get two canoes down to the water on top of our Honda Fit!
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