West Greenland Kayak Build, Frame number 3, measuring, thinking, and a little bit of actual work.
It seems like the hardest part of designing is just keeping my hands moving. There’s a zillion choices to puzzle over but the reality is until you’ve made at least 5 variations of the same boat you really don’t have enough information to truly predict performance. Eventually you get there but in the beginning it’s just stabbing at ideas and hoping to get lucky.
I’ve always tried to replicate museum kayaks that have more user-friendly performance but this is the first time I’ve ever applied any real design pressure, so there’s an inordinate amount of squinting and scribbling and second-guessing going on. Having the previous frame with known performance to measure off of has been hugely helpful.
After sucking some volume out of the bow and adding it to the stern while building the deck shape, I figured this would put me a touch light on the tracking so I added an extra 3/8 inch of skeg in the stern resulting in a slide reverse rocker back there that is pretty common on this type of kayak. I already know I’m gonna be pretty crabby about what this will do to the magical maneuverability of the previous boat, but it really is necessary for crosswind and downwind paddling.
I’ve spread the stringers as far as I can for stability but still nowhere near the historical examples where the skin would have been touching the ribs. I might actually move these temporary early and do a test just to see what that would’ve felt like.
I’ve slightly changed the shape of the Masik to hopefully gain a little more comfort. I try to make these as thin as possible and pictured is my test for making sure I haven’t gone too far!
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