Canoe, single paddle solo lapstrake, sought

[Jim M]

There's lots of double paddle designs but I wonder how they are for single paddle. I want something small & light to just paddle for fun.

[Wild Dingo]

Jim... Mac McCarthy... feather weight canoes... get ye to feather canoes (http://www.feathercanoes.com) bloody top bloke to by the by...

Also get the book by Mac called intreguingly enough "feather weight canoes" or such... walks you through the whole shamozle and includes patterns with numbers for you to use... watch em but cause Macs a funny buggar he threw a couple of loose numbers in there just to keep you on your toes! :D or shell the 20 for the proper patterns and dont worry about measureing each spot and marking them... just lay the patterns poke em through with a scribe connect the dots and cut

Beautiful and light :cool:

mmmm oops see you wanted a lapstrake one... Iain Oughtred has one called the wee rob see Flat Ducks (http://www.duckflatwoodenboats.com/) nope duck flats!! :D

Good luck!

[ 12-31-2003, 11:03 AM: Message edited by: Wild Dingo ]

[garland reese]

I Imagine you could paddle any of the double paddle designs with a single paddle, if you wanted to. I have done it with my Wee II a couple of times, and it works, but sitting in the bottom of the boat is not the best position for a single paddle. It required a short paddle and was difficult to get good leverage, but in my situation, it worked fine 'cause I was just tooling around in quiet water and in no need to apply much power. Quiet, easy "j" strokes kept the boat traking pretty straight while paddling on just one side only. Actually it is not a bad idea to keep a small single paddle handy in a double paddle canoe. Sometimes you can find yourself exploring areas that are very narrow or strewn with logs and stuff, and a little single paddle is just the ticket to continue onward.

With boats this small, there is a great advantage in stability when sitting very low in the boat. An elevated seat in one of these tiny canoes might result in something that is alarmingly unstable. I dont' mean to discount or discourage you,.......just food for thought. Canoes are not very stable to begin with.

Check out these designs.......any of these could probably be done in glued lap ply, Oughtred or Hill fahsion. I bet Paul would be happy to help you with the details.
Selway-Fisher (http://www.selway-fisher.com/Opcan15.htm)
Garland

[Brian Palmer]

Cheasapeake Light Craft (CLC) sells a kit for a 12 foot canoe that can be paddled sitting on a low seat with a single blade.

I built a Tom Hill 11 1/2 footer and paddle it only with a double blade and like it very much. I tried it once with a single, sitting on my ankles and it was not comfortable. A low seat would help, but would reduce stability. I have several other canoes that I paddle with a single blade.

Unless you really want to go from scratch, the CLC kit looks like the most efficient way to go. I built mine from scratch and it was a lot of work for something not much different from the CLC boat, and was probably about the same cost as the kit boat.

Hope this helps,

Brian

[JimConlin]

How abour Bear Mountain's

Solo Tripper (http://www.bearmountainboats.com/17-0SoloTripper.asp)

http://www.bearmountainboats.com/Images/17-0SoloTripper.gif

[Don Maurer]

Most solo double paddle canoes should work provided they have a thwart somewhere close to center. The traditional paddling method is kneeling in the bottom with your butt against the thwart. It would still be tippier than sitting in the bottom with a double paddle, but OK for quiet water. Don't try it with a seat at gunwale level, though.

[On Vacation]

http://www.geocities.com/pkessinger/boat2.jpg

this ain't all bad.
http://www.geocities.com/pkessinger/

[Bill Perkins]

A bit of tumblehome is nice when useing a single paddle . It makes it a little easier to reach the water I think and keeps the paddleface a little closer to the boats centerline .

[chrisk]

Check out the "Canoe Shop" by Chris Kulczycki for some lapstrake designs. He uses a method called "lap-stitch" that gets you a lapstrake boat without the need of any frames. The Sassafras 12 is a double paddle model. the Sassafras 14 and 16 are the normal single paddle type canoe. Chesapeake Light Craft (http://www.clcboats.com) sells kits for the 12 and 16. They used to sell a kit for the 14 as well, but I no longer see it on their web page. I always thought the 14 would make a nice solo canoe to cartop around for just myself on calm lakes.

Chris Kottaridis (chrisk@quietwind.net)

[Cuyahoga Chuck]

Chris Kukczycki is my hero but his Lapstitch canoes have one fault-excessive weight.
His system uses the least number of planks brought together at severe angles. It takes a lot of epoxy to fill all the gaps. The system requires a layer of 'glass on the inside with even more epoxy and more weight.
Size for size, Tom Hill's style of construction produces a lighter boat. Mostly wood, a minimum of epoxy and no 'glass.
Hill's system is just like the old timers'. At least 7 planks to a side lots of rolling bevels to plane but no nails and no ribs.
I haven't seen many plans for this style of construction. I think folks are turned off by the steep learning curve.
Tom Hill offered plans at one time.
If you can learn to delineate planks on a mold (called lining off) you can convert any round bottom canoe design into lapstrake.
Tom Hill lays it all out in "Ultralight Boatbuilding" and Walter J. Simmons explains "lining off" in "Building Lapstrake Canoes".
Tbere aren't many amateurs building in this style so if you pull it off your in elite company.
Chuck

[On Vacation]

Originally posted by Bill Perkins:
A bit of tumblehome is nice when useing a single paddle . It makes it a little easier to reach the water I think and keeps the paddleface a little closer to the boats centerline .There is some truth to this. But it also depends on how much freeboard and high you are sitting inside the boat. In general, most canoes are double paddled anyway. Many of the single operation canoes are narrower than most average canoes.

[Brian Palmer]

I might disagree on the weight issue about the lapstitch boats from CLC. I don't expect they would be any heavier. My Tom Hill designed 11 1/2 ft Charlotte is about 29 lbs and I was pretty careful with the materials (all pine and spruce for the parts that weren't plywood and no excess glue or glass). The CLC Sassafras is advertised at about 27 lbs, so any difference is probably due to just normal boat-to-boat variation. The Charlotte does have some parts that are not in the CLC boat, though, like stems, keel, and an extra floor panel under the seat that adds a little weight.

I think Tom Hill's method is great if you are building to one of his designs or adapting another design to glued plywood. I was able to build a lapstrake boat with no other lapstrake experience, just using his book and plans.

-- Brian

[Cuyahoga Chuck]

Brian,
There's something about this comparison that doesn't add up.
Tom Hill's two smaller canoes are shown to be approximately the same weight as Chris Kukczycki's smaller Sassafrases. But Kulczycki's 16 footer is listed as being 65 lbs. while Hill's canoe of the same length is listed as only
49 1/2 bs. That's a 30% difference and that's what I was recalling when I made my original criticism.
Charlie

[chrisk]

Chris Kulczycki's 16 footer uses 6 mm ply while his 12 and 14 footer use 4 mm ply. The 14 footer claims to come in at 40 lbs and his 16 footer at 65 lbs. I assume most of that weight difference is going to the 50 % thicker plywood.

Does Tom Hill use 4mm on his 16 footer or 6 mm ply?

I don't have his book handy. It's one of the few boat building books in our local library so I go check it out whenever I want to reference it.

[LeeG]

The Sass12 is that light,,or near it but you can't sit anywhere but on the bottom as it's too tippy sitting higher,,maybe if your seat was 2" off the bottom it might be possible. I didn't find a single blade that comfortable given the gunnel/seat difference compared to a kayak paddle.
The Sass14 was sold as a 4mm construction but the design was committed to in it's first construction "demo boat" in 6mm. Right before production that was switched to 4mm as 6mm was deemed too heavy but a 4mm "demo" version wasn't built until a years production went by. I don't know of any customers feedback on the 4mm versions they made or in classes but the shop version in 4mm was much too flexible in the bottom panels as well as the handling/tracking suffering, it would wander compared to the 6mm version and the first joints/laps cracked which could have been to a large part marginal construction but for the weight/forces I don't think unglassed lap joints in 4mm is very strong for that size of boat,,it worked in the Sass12 so it was assumed it would work in the 14, but the forces/cross section aren't the same. For some incomprehensible reason it was marketed as a double but there doesn't exist a double with that low of displacement as the Sass14. It's displacement for a 225lb single paddler was fine and paddled well as a single in the 6mm version. Again I don't know how other 4mm versions looked but the one I saw had a different keeline than the 6mm version. Bascially the design was an extrapolation of the Sass16 and 12. Ironically it paddled better (tracking/turning) in the "prototype" 6mm version than the released 4mm version and better as a canoe than the Sass16 and was more of a solo canoe than the Sass12 which is really a rec. kayak that looks like a canoe.

[ 01-06-2004, 09:41 PM: Message edited by: LeeG ]

[Jim M]

Thanks for the replies.

1. My Oughtred MacGregor, scaled down to 13 or so feet, would not be the ideal single paddle boat. In order to sail better, it's beamy.

2. No lapstitch, thanks, too heavy. I'm going to use 2.8 mm planking and little if any glass. Besides it's way more work and money and toxic exposure to glass everything than to just bevel the planks and be done with it.

3. The Bear mountain solo tripper looks like a good shape but I wonder about doing it lapstrake.

All of this seems to support the traditional design method of carving a desirable hull model first and taking the offsets from it. But it occurred to me I couldn't remember seeing a small lapstrake single paddle canoe and I couldn't figure out why.

[chrisk]

For solo canoe that's "small & light" I'd really lean towards Green Valley's Osprey, A nice one is shown at Green Valley web (http://www.greenval.com) . Bear Mountain's solo tripper is 17' long, but probably more appropriate if you are going to do some trips rather then just play around.

Lots of good strip canoes though, it's hard to go too wrong. Don't know for sure about lapstrake for a strip design, but it certainly seems do-able. I also don't know enough about it to know if you can get away with 2.8 mm without some kind of internal framing. Good luck!

Chris Kottaridis (chrisk@quietwind.net)

[chrisk]

LeeG, thanks for the history. That probably explains why the sass14 is no longer on CLC's web site.

Chris Kottaridis (chrisk@quietwind.net)

[chrisk]

Sorry for the multiple postings, but this brings up another question I had. Would the book "Elements of Boat Strength", listed in the Wooden Boat Store have information that could help a person determine what thickness of lapstrake plywood a person should use in this case, building lapstrake to a strip/fiberglass design or vice-a-versa ?

I am mostly interested in small boats like canoes or canoe yawls, like William Garden's Eel in lapstrake for example.

Chris Kottaridis (chrisk@quietwind.net)

[Phil Young]

Tom Hill's book and the method described is excellent. I have minimal boatbuilding skills, but a few years ago put together a building frame, cut some moulds using some bendy battens to get smooth lines, and used some more bendy battens to work out where the planks should lie. Then planked her up using glued clinker ply construction. The result was a very light, undecked canoe. The bottom was maybe a bit too round which made it a bit tippy. One of the planks was slightly unfair near the stern, but looked OK. It really wasn't hard, just do it.