Some ideas

Since I last posted, I have begun to put together a really solid plan for the way forward.  Part of this plan is to build a "foot" which I will be able to install on the old junk canoe (which needs a name, so I will take suggestions).  That wil give me the ability to test the mechanical parts and refine them in a really controlled and scientific way.  The hull, though, remains a problem.  

So, as things go, the problem sort of solved itself.  

I began to reread my books on canoe building (Canoecraft, Building a Strip Canoe, and the Stripper's Guide to Canoe Building) to make sure I was primed for the heavy naval literature I would be confronted with.  And, as I had gotten these out, the internet was out due to a storm.  The combination of no distraction, leftover beer, and a focused subject lead me to a clever solution.  Sometimes these things just resolve themselves.

I was sort of dreaming about doing a couple strip canoes this winter and applying some of my own really interesting ideas to the construction when I hit on the idea of building a model.  Then I started thinking about scale and so on, and this is what hit me: if I scaled a canoe I could put it in water (which is a constant) and get a scaled result of the info the plans would have provided.  No big deal.  But, what if I was to build quarter scale models of Fenrir?  Wouldn't that tell me what the displacement with a given weight?  Sounds reasonable.

I called my engineer Meers-Cat and asked him, and he couldn't think of a reason why it shouldn't work.

So, it sounds like I am going to build some scale models.  Not only will I get a lot of data, but I will do it without the mathematical confusion.  Also, it's really cheap to build little tiny boats (so the physical properties and the price are scaleable), which is good.  I will still be building a canoe or two (or three) this winter, but all of it is going to start as models.

A note on canoe building books and my library:

Canoecraft is a very nice book.  It is beautiful and a great source for technique.  However, there are no included plans, and that makes everything expensive.  Building a Strip Canoe is a better budget buy.  The technique is the same, and while it doesn't explain the theory of hulls and boats and their dynamics, and it uses photos instead of the beautiful drawings, it did include a bunch of plans.  I good buy.  The Stripper's Guide is a terrible book.  It is ugly and incomplete, and is not terribly well written.  However, it comes with plans and you can find a bunch of them used on Amazon.com.  If you can be sure it has the plans and it is cheap enough, I would buy it, but I would not attempt to build a boat using that book.