Today was a little bit of on the water testing, and a lot of frowning while chewing on details.
Because I’m using the Mirage drive it made sense to actually try one before I install it, so I met a friend down at the dock to take a spin in his Hobie for a few minutes. Other than the massive weight and sluggishness compared to my type of construction, I’m a huge fan of Hobie products. They have so many awesome innovative solutions, almost everything is durable and actually works like advertised. Even little details like this instant access paddle holder that you can operate with one hand. It’s just a bungee and the hook, but it works better than anything else I’ve seen.
I couldn’t judge propulsion efficiency because this is so different than my boats. Also, this particular kayak is absolutely dependent on the rudder to maintain control. I don’t think that will be quite as true with my designs, although I did realize that by placing what is essentially a dagger board ahead of the center of lateral resistance, I could end up with massive weathercocking problems in a crosswind. That’s kind of a huge problem because I’m not willing to put a rudder on one of my canoes, but I’ll just have to build it and see how bad it is.
Next, I took one of my own canoes out on the water with the drive sitting in the bottom to try to judge seat position and balance point. I think the safest plan here is to bias it towards an aft trim and hope for the best.
I also realized that the seating geometry needs to be extremely specific, and that I’m going to have to set the height of the seat with the depth of the boat because of various framing constraints. Without getting into details this basically means I’m gonna have to tear apart all the work that I just did and redo it, but before I do that, I’m gonna take a day to make a working prototype of the drive attachment just to make sure there’s not gonna be any hidden surprises when I go to actually install this thing in the frame. The studio is a bit of a disaster this evening.
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