Dec 04, 2005
Boat maintenance and black helicopters.
Photos, videos and paddle blanks.

Sep 25, 2006. A Few Thoughts on Skin on Frame Technology

If you scroll down a little, you will see my latest attempts at skin on frame boatery, namely, canoeing with an outrigger. A number of things struck me about this exercise. First of all, canoeing is a blast. You get to put your whole body into paddling. In addition, canoeing is more relaxed than kayaking. You can pack some lunch and a few beers and don't have to worry about flipping over if you turn your head too far to one side. Don't get me wrong, I love kayaking as well, but it's more of an expedition to take off in a kayak. Survival gear is required since the likelihood of capsize is ever present. Of course there's nothing that can compare with dancing in big waves with a well behaved kayak, but more often than not with my present location on SF bay, there aren't any big waves. Paddling a kayak is more of an exercise in mindless slogging.

So anyway, the point of all this is that there's more than one way of being on the water. You can paddle, you can row, you can sail and should you be so inclined, you can even motor. But few people do more than one. There is the matter of time. There is also the matter of space and expense. You can only afford so many boats.

But here is where sof (skin on frame) technology comes in. For the cost of a carbon fiber paddle ($300) or less and a max of 120 hours of your time, you can build just about any sort of watercraft that you could imagine. You can build a canoe, a kayak, a sailboat, a motorboat. Furthermore, the cost is so low, that you can build them all, one after the other and learn way more about boat design than just about any other way.

Sof is light. You can cartop just about any of your creations. You don't need a trailer and you don't need to rent dock space.

Sof uses few materials. This keeps costs down and makes for minimum impact on the neighborhood. Cost is a big deal. It's not just a matter of coming up with money, it's also a matter of what happens to your attitude toward a boat when you have a lot of money tied up in it. An SOF boat is cheap enough so that when you get tired of it or just have too many, you can give them away to friends. And instantly, you have room to build another boat. Secondly, there's none of the peripheral nonsense to deal with, such as bank loans, insurance, etc. You get the picture. Expensive things have a way of turning into millstones.

Low cost of SOF also enters into the building side. How many people other than professional boat builders can afford to build boat after boat just to amuse themselves. The usual amateur boat builder is lucky if he/she builds one boat in a lifetime. The average skin boat builder builds a new boat every year or two. After a while, you get to be pretty good at this.

So I say to the huddled nautical masses, throw off your lead ballast and start building skin on frame.

Sep 24, 2006. Baidarka Lashings

From time to time, I am asked how the deck stringer on a baidarka is lashed to the tail fin. Everyone assumes that they should be lashed although the drawings of the museum boat from Atka don't show any lashing. I guess that people feel that there should be a lashing here and that possibly, whoever made the drawing, left it out by mistake.

I lash the tail to the deck stringer and also to the cross blocks.

Here's how the Atka boat in the Phoebe Hearst museum is lashed. The tailfin is lashed to the tail cross blocks. There is also a lashing that goes over the top of the tailfin, under the cross blocks and over the end of the deck stringer. I presume this was done to hold the deck stringer down. But there wasn't any lashing pulling the deck stringer against the tailfin.

Sep 20, 2006. Outrigger Trials

I've been meaning to try an outrigger on my canoe. Two reasons for this.

• inexperienced paddlers seem to have a hard time with this boat. It's bottom is too round and the boat constantly seems on the verge of going over.
• I have had Polynesian outrigger books gathering dust on my bookshelf for half a decade and I wanted to experiment with outriggers and sails on canoes.

But as with all things new, there was threshold resistance to proceeding. What was holding me back from actually trying outriggers was a number of reasons.

• What to use for an outrigger float?
• How heavy should the float be?
• How far out should the float be?
• How to attach the float to the boom?
• What to use for outrigger booms?

No real show stoppers in this list except my lack of ambition, but then a number of things happened to put me on the path to outrigger experimentation.

Two weeks ago I went to Hyde St. Pier in San Francisco for the annual boating event there. One of the features was a one day boat building contest. Boats had to be built and launched that day and raced around a short course. The best performing boat as it turned out was an outrigger canoe. The outrigger poles were two by fours and the float was a chunk of balsa. This boat was way in the lead during the race until all three of its occupants decided to switch paddles to the side away from the outrigger. Over it went. Nevertheless, I now had some motivation to build a test outrigger. Two by fours would do fine.

The second thing that happened was that I found some big chunks of plastic foam on the beach. The chunks were about 6 foot long by two foot wide. Cut in half, these would make perfect outrigger floats.

So I finally took the time to do an outrigger trial. The outrigger under way is shown on the right in my test tank, the seaplane lagoon on the former Alameda Naval Air station. The boat shop is the tin shed at the far right of the picture. As you can see, the float is leaning to one side. There's two reasons for that, one is that it was set too deep and the other was that it's not lashed to the boom very securely.

In any case, the experiment was largely a success. I was able to figure out depth of the float and distance of the float from the boat, the two main things. Distance of the float from the boat has to be sufficient so you can get a paddle in there. Stability was fine. Total beam with the float was 6 foot. I was able to stand up in the boat and paddle. On the downwind run, I just stood up and steered with the paddle. Also, the outrigger wanted to be downwind. This is ok for a boat that is sailed, but for one that's strictly paddled, it's nice to be more versatile.

I will also be doing a double outrigger, i.e. a trimaran trial as soon as I can find some ten foot poles. One of the requirements of this experiment is that I don't buy materials. Everything has to be beachcombed or dumpsterdived. Stay tuned.

Aug 28, 2006. Another Baidarka Course

Just finished teaching another baidarka course. Had one student. Not something to get rich off but a good course all the same. The thing about having students is that I am forced to build a more diverse range of boats than I would build for myself. This boat was a variation on the short 14 foot baidarka. The variation on this one was a heavy stringer set at the midpoint of where the ribs make the bend from the bottom to the sides. The heavier stringer pushes the skin farther out and makes the boat wider at the water line. The width at the waterline increases maybe an inch at best, but in a narrow boat, that's a lot.

Here Tom is putting the varnish on the boat. It almost looks like a hard chine Greenlander, but in the water, the pressure of the water pushes the skin in and brings the other two hull stringers into play.

Aug 28, 2006. Hobie Cats

I overheard someone at the local kayak store telling a customer that Hobie Cat sit on top kayaks are currently their best selling boats. They retail for under $1200. That's less than my kayak building course. Why are they so popular? Same reason as automatic transmissions, microwave ovens and remote controls, namely ease of use. You don't have to develop any skills to use one. You don't have to take any safety courses to get in one of these. Just hop on top and go. They are the rough equivalent of a tricycle. Anyone can use one.

And there is the lack of fear factor. No fear of flipping and being trapped inside the boat.

Could you build a skin on frame sit on top? Probably. I guess if you can answer the question why you would want a boat like that then you could build a skin on frame version. Cost, $200. Not long ago, I saw a stitch and glue plywood version that someone had built. Pretty faithful knockoff of a Hobie. We'll wait and see. Sit on tops could be like CB radios years ago, or maybe they might endure. If they do, it's because they're a good idea and people will start doing SOF versions.