A plan for the West Greenland Kayak redesign is starting to coalesce. I’m going to keep the IV-A-375 replica as the foundation for our West Greenland Kayak design (kayak 67 in Harvey Golden’s book Kayaks of Greenland) and I’m not going to change the basic shape beyond what is seen on other collected examples of it’s type.
However, as I looked at my replica and my reference materials I realized that there are some ways I might extract more versatility for people who are attracted to the historic shape but would like more freedom to tweak the performance for their personal preferences.
First there’s a few small errors in my original replica that if corrected may slightly improve the boat. I might be splitting hairs here but me being the obsessive maniac I am I’m going to toss my existing plans and rebuild it from scratch.
Next, I already offer this kayak in two different scales, and a third version which is scaled longitudinally but not in cross-section which is very popular, so I’m thinking why not take it a step further and expand that into three different fully proportional scales and then give people the opportunity to separate the longitudinal and cross-sectional scales resulting in 9 different kayaks that can be built from one plan set, all of which would still be within historic parameters but would let people add and subtract stability, speed, capacity, rolling ability, etc.
Finally, I’m going to experiment with a mechanical skeg. Tie on skegs were common on traditional Greenland Kayaks of this type so I don’t feel like this is changing the kayak performance so much as just saving the time of having to get out of your boat and untie the skeg when you don’t need it.
This particular Greenland Kayak weathercocks less than most, so this really isn’t necessary, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to try and as long as I’m redesigning the frame I might as well make provisions for it.
So yeah, this whole thing just snowballed into about 10 times as big of a project as I was planning but I think we’re gonna end up with something really cool on the other side.
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