We have officially achieved escape velocity, the new West Greenland Kayak plan is live.
I’m still not sure exactly how this whole thing snowballed from: I should probably build a new Greenland kayak to talk about in the upcoming explainer video, to I think I could make this design a little bit better, to maybe I should start from scratch for a complete redesign, to maybe I should build 3 frames, wrap them in saran wrap 8 times and try it in a bunch of different configurations on the water, to wouldn’t it be cool if this was scalable to the same size range as my modern kayaks, to I wonder if we could create a system on the backend to create custom sizes for each individual, to I think we should reshoot the entire fitting section of the Kayak Building Course, to as long as we’re doing this maybe we should just rebuild this and every other plan set that we have to make all the information even better….
Fortunately I have an incredible business manager and graphic designer to help bring all this to fruition, and for the last two weeks we started every morning by reviewing a fresh plan set, catching errors, making changes, and then Liz works on the plans all day we start again the next day.
Big changes to the system are that I framed the kayak more densely than before, making it more historically accurate but also giving me the freedom to scale up the plan for paddlers from child size to 240 pounds. Also I’ve incorporated an experimental new rib height measuring system that gives additional information for shaping the ribs. Finally I reimagined the entire fitting system for this kayak and I am genuinely surprised that I was able to achieve this level of comfort in a Greenland kayak.
By keeping the shaping details within the boundaries of what is known from museum examples, I have tried to honor the history of these kayaks as they actually were, so paddlers wishing to explore this branch of the sport can understand that a Greenland Kayaks is so much more then just low volume and pointy ends.
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See the original post and discussion here.
