I have decided to go on a design adventure.
I am a bit of an outdoor enthusiast, I really enjoy going back
country camping. I am slowly but surely gathering all the equipment I
need to make longer trips more possible, and affordable. One
large cost in my adventures is renting a canoe. I decided I should
maybe look at buying one in the future, but even used canoes were all
well over 500$ for anything in decent condition. I did however, find
a great website that could solve my problem.
http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=4774
This website details a grad students efforts to create a canoe (in
less than a weekend, no less) from scratch. There are two main
methods to making a boat. The one he used, and that I will use as
well, is stitch and glue. It requires carefully planned strips of
plywood that are stitched (zip tied) together, then glued. The other
method involves making a canoe mold, and bending a material (epoxy,
cedar, aluminium, etc.) over the mold. Being a mechanical engineering
student, I decided the former method would be more fun to design, and
require a lot less woodworking skill.
I decided not to go with the free pattern that the above blog led
to, because it had a completely flat bottom. Though this makes the
boat more stable, it also means there is a lot more drag on the hull,
making it harder to move through the water. So I will design my own
boat instead. I plan on using SolidWorks to optimize the general
profile, and cutting and gluing little paper pieces to finalize the
plywood shape (unless I think of a smart way to get SolidWorks to go
from flat to bent material, instead of the other way around).
In the end, as long as I come up with something useful, I will
post my design for free, so anyone can use it.
Next posts: A Study in Hulls
