One of the most frustrating things for me is when I come up with a kayak design that I can’t quite make work in skin on frame.
An idea I’ve been working on for over 10 years is a medium volume, medium length crossover kayak for distance touring on high volume rivers with a lot of twisty swift water and the occasional significant rapid.
My work on North Alaskan kayaks a few years ago breathed fresh life into this project and I was really excited about the prototype. It’s a cool boat and a lot more efficient than any existing crossover kayak but there are just some shaping issues that I couldn’t overcome in skin on frame. I also want a really specific weight/durability profile that’s presently only available in thermoform plastic or possibly the new ultra tough composites.
I also ran into the problem that nearly everyone who asked me about this kayak misunderstood what it was for. 95% of people who contacted me about this boat should either be in my F1 kayak or a cheap whitewater kayak from the 1990s.
So I’ve let the design die for now but occasionally I get inquiries from someone who just has to have one and I just explain how to build it. It’s not a hard boat to build and the deck is exactly the same as my F1.
The latest builder is a computer design guy who wants to make a 3-D model. Modeling isn’t terribly useful for my type of boat building because each kayak is customized to the individual, but he was really stoked about it so I took a couple hours and made a table of offsets. Maybe I can share the drawing when its done and talk about what I would like to change on this boat if I didn’t have the shaping restrictions of skin on frame.
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