Subject: Re: [baidarka] Greenland kayak beam calculation
From: Michael Daly (michaeldaly@home.com)
Date: Sun Jun 10 2001 - 10:32:15 EDT
From: "Chris Brown" <chris.brown@zetnet.co.uk>
> What you are saying is that the southern race of us human beings has
> a higher centre of gravity. That would obviously change the way a boat behaves.
> The question then boils down to...
> Do we want to paddle a replica boat exact in every detail to the
> historical boats
Hard to do without a source of sealskin. (I have a kayak that is covered with sealskin...
but it's only two feet long and was created by an Inuit artist.) Mark Rogers suggested
that neoprene, without the nylon facing, might duplicate some of the properties but
wouldn't be very durable (but then your dog probably won't eat the neoprene!).
> or do we want to experience our paddling in a boat
> with a paddle which is in the style of a historical boat?
>
I'd suggest that we have three choices to accomplish this:
1 - Build a kayak using traditional techniques for dimensions and hope it fits (true
for some, not for me - too tall even though I've a tiny bit of Inuit ancestry)
2 - Re-cast the anthropometric measures to suit our slightly differently scaled bodies.
3 - Take measurements off of existing kayaks in museums etc. and scale the dimensions
up to our bodies (to do this correctly requires either knowledge of the size of the original
owner or the rules he used).
Personally, I've been rather dismayed by the apparent obsession with 1 in the skin on frame
kayak builders community. If I may be blunt, it seems rather like a blind approach - rigid
adherence to an (possibly) inappropriate rule. BTW, I'll be the first to admit that the errors
in this are probably small.
The third option was suggested to me by John Winters a year ago. It makes sense to me
to find a kayak that has handling characteristics that are known to be wonderful and scale
it, rather than build a kayak that "fits perfectly" according to an arbitrary rule.
Mike
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