Oar and outriggers

[Audioten]

I'm just about to finnish Sam Devlin's Oarling.
The beam is 3 ft 5 inches and i think I'll need some outriggers.

Anyone who has any suggestions on how long the outriggers should be, and the oars.

[mizzenman]

competition scullers usualy have 1.5 to 1.7 meters between the oarlocks

[Spokaloo]

Will you be fitting it out as a fixed seat rowboat or a sliding seat boat? If a fixed boat, use the search function as it has been covered extensively in the forums. If sliding seat, you want your 'locks to be 1600mm apart at fit out, and adjusted in or out depending on the oars you use, your size, and what you can efficiently row.

E

[bainbridgeisland]

Oarling is too short to effectively use a sliding seat. You need at least a 16-ft waterline length and 17 to 19 feet is better. Therefore if you use outriggers, they would simply be to fit longer oars. So the question you have to ask yourself is how long of oar do you want to use? This will determine if you need outriggers and how big the need to be.

For short outriggers a simple hinged flap of plywood works pretty well. It is arranged to flip outboard and rest over the gunwale for support. I have used these up to 10-inches effective distance outboard of the rail.

[Audioten]

I will be fitting it as a fixed seat boat. I was thinking of using 8' oars. I tryed to test it out with oarlock's 1500mm apart. It seem's ok? But don't know how this will be in the water.

The outriggers I will try to make from some hinged stainless tube's bendt as an A arm.

[bainbridgeisland]

For 8-ft oars, you need about 50-inch beam assuming you don't mind your hands crossing on the recovery (most folks get used to this easily). That means your oarlock needs to be about 4.5-inches outboard of the gunwale.

There are actually bronze metal oarlocks that fold out to about this width. They flip over the rail the same way the plywood flap does that I mentioned before. If you are looking for a source, I think I saw them at "classic marine hardware" but I am not sure. They are expensive but look good.

As mentioned before you can build a plywood flap that does the same thing. They are hinged on the inboard side of the gunwale. The one I used was about 1-inch thick, laminated up from thinner plywood. It was about 8-inches wide at the inside of the gunwale and about 4-inches wide at the oarlock. It just had a normal bronze oarlock inset into the surface. As I recall, the hinges were pretty stout.

When hinged inboard, this sort of outrigger does not interfere with coming alongside a dock or other boat. Which is nice.

[bainbridgeisland]

Oh yeah, one more thing. If you install one of these flip out oarlocks, don't forget to move the seat up a little higher. i.e. if the oarlock is mounted 1-inch higher, move the seat up 1-inch as well.

[peterAustralia]

To see an example of how a rower has built small demountbale yet strong outriggers to increase width between rowlocks see here

http://intheboatshed.net/?p=720

my 18' dory has very small outriggers which add about 2" on each side. My oars are 8' long, I do not do the overlap thing though I guess I could learn. My rowlocks are 51" apart. Would I change things?.. in retrospect maybe if the oars were a bit shorter and/or the 51" was a couple inches wider, that would be nice. These are clues there from my exerience, and this appear to fit in with what others in this thread recommend.

peterAustralia

[Audioten]

Thank's guys.

This helps me a lot.

Got the first layer og varnish on the boat today.
Nice to get the colur back in the wood after sanding:)

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m221/audioten/Bilde213.jpg

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m221/audioten/Bilde214.jpg