We’re sharing some of our favorite skin-on-frame photos from the last 15 years while we build the tiny house. (Check out @actuallytiny).
Here Tom and I are checking out the very intentionally unfair lines of my F1 kayak design.
Visually the curves seem to flow nicely when the kayak is finished but a lot of that is a smoothing trick of the mind. The F1 is packed with unfair curves and tortured tension to get the shaping that creates its unique handling characteristics.
We see this a lot of this in traditional Arctic kayaks as well, and one of the biggest mistakes that builders make when constructing modern interpretations of them is to fair those unfair curves too much. It’s a natural thing to do and it’s what the wood naturally wants to do, but boats in general don’t perform very well without at least some strategic fattening and squeezing of things. Greenland kayaks are especially easy to get wrong because to the eye they appear to be composed of long sweeping lines, but the sterns especially are often quite voluminous, and both Harvey Golden and myself have broken gunwales near the aft stem connection trying to replicate historic boats.
The F1 is interesting because it has a very full symmetrically shaped deck that stays as fat as possible to the ends which gives it excellent buoyancy, capacity, and stability. The hull on the other hand has a fine entry transitioning into swede-form shape that sweeps up dramatically in the stern which is responsible for its quickness and maneuverability. Getting these two very different shapes to connect to each other over the distance of just a few vertical inches really stretches the limits of what’s possible in skin-on-frame. In some ways skin-on-frame is a liberating medium with its dramatically shortened prototyping times but it’s definitely challenging when it comes to pursuing exotic shapes!
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
