The thing I love most about skin on frame is how easy it is to make changes on each new boat, allowing for both rapid design evolution and customization for individual paddlers.
Here are my sketch notes from the recent highly modified F1 and some pictures of the finished kayak. This was going to be for a customer who wanted a rock garden boat but I ended up deciding to keep it for myself and I’m going to build him another.
As an iteratative designer you either have to know what you’re doing or just be willing to burn ridiculous amounts of time and money. For me it’s some of both. Sometimes I’ll be four or five boats deep down a design hole and starting to wonder if I have any clue about anything at all, but then I nail some shaping variable or modification I’ve been trying to understand and the feeling is incredible.
The thing I’m really starting to appreciate this year is just how much of a difference getting the EXACT right rocker balance makes. The saran wrap test I did with the Greenland design this spring taught me that if you can perfectly match the rate of engagement at the bow with the rate of release at the stern on an edge turn, it creates a synergistic effect that massively boosts edge turn performance with less loss of speed. The bad news is that more than an 8th inch out from optimum and the magic starts to disappear and at a quarter inch it’s gone…
Beyond hull shaping there’s also just choosing the right construction details for the job. Ideally you want the strength of all the components to be matched and my approach to this is just destructive testing. For the first 15 years that I built skin boats I beat the living crap out of them to see what would actually fail under what conditions, so I could reinforce only the trouble spots selectively and make more durable boats without adding a lot more weight.
Designed to handle heavy rock garden abuse this particular kayak weighs an appalling 38 pounds! Personally I prefer the normal version which weighs closer to 30, but everybody has different needs.
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