I encourage my kayak and canoe building students to text me pictures of their test ribs. This works almost as well as standing in the room with someone and gives both of us a sanity check on shaping before they commit to cutting and bending the rest of their often pricey bending stock.
For kayak building I barely even need to glance at my phone before firing off a response, but for the canoe building it still feels a bit like playing God because I’m still relatively new to canoe design and my shaping recommendations are evolving with each new build.
The cool thing about what I do, however, is that every time either myself or a student creates a superior shape I can go into the plans that day and change the formulas and send out an update so everyone else who is building can immediately benefit from that knowledge.
There’s even a page in the building course where I put the exact specs of builds that turned out especially well so anyone looking to replicate those boats can just grab all the numbers and skip working through the formulas in the plans.
This canoe is a solo for a 220 lb guy. He decided to go with 31 inches wide, 12 inches deep, and 15‘6“ long with a fairly full hull shape. That should end up 29” at the gunwales and 30” overall once the tumblehome gets pulled in if he decides to go that route.
I’m hoping that this will feel for him at 220lbs like a 14’6 x 30 feels for me at 160. He is moving through his build pretty quickly so we will find out soon enough!
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