Sailblade, an invention for sail powering kayaks with M4 version of a K-F foil rendered in spyderfoam, and steel tubing, and wood. Takes about 6 to 8 hours to build once all materials are on site. On skin-on-frame kayak for prototype development. We will be doing water trials with video and photos in next few days.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Okay boaters and boat nuts everywhere. | |
| This is a quick look at a prototype of the sailblade for my kayak. | |
| We're out here in Growdome. | |
| I'm using my GoPro camera on this because my other one doesn't have a charge. | |
| This dome is in too much shade to be used for gardening and it's going to be disassembled and relocated when we move here. | |
| In the meantime, it's being used for the purpose of constructing our little structure here. | |
| Most sails for kayaks are on the front of the beast. | |
| That has a tendency to shift the center of effort and the center of lateral resistance forward. | |
| It has a tendency to drive the bow down, especially in oncoming seas of any height at all. | |
| So for a number of reasons, I went ahead and built a mizzen-based sail structure for this boat. | |
| You'll notice that I don't quite have the same kind of profile along the bottom as most of the flat kayaks. | |
| So I've shifted my skeg, which is usually beaching skeg because we don't have sand around here. | |
| We have rock and other nasties. | |
| Moved it back so that I've shifted my own center of effort directly into the area of my main paddle reach. | |
| Then this mizzen-based sail structure here called a sail blade, for lack of a better term, is going to also pull my center of effort back. | |
| Should raise my bow slightly, especially for beaching if I'm beaching under sail. | |
| The structure folds up relatively easily. | |
| It's all built on foam, folds up as you see. | |
| It's a number of ropes to pull it to get it to activate. | |
| It's behind the area of my swing, especially flat, but even extended. | |
| I won't be bashing into it. | |
| I have two control ropes, one on each side of the thing for swinging the foil. | |
| You'll notice that the foil is atypical. | |
| This is a crude model. | |
| I did all of this, by the way, in about six hours. | |
| The paint job is crap, but the foil is sealed with resin. | |
| This is a form of a foil known as an Model 4 KF or Klein-Fogelman foil. | |
| It's made out of spider foam that has 100 pounds lifting force and is reinforced longitudinally within the foam. | |
| It was just sawed. | |
| It has some 3-ounce fiberglass cloth on it and some quick cure phenolic resin to keep it all watertight. | |
| It's mounted on a single shaft, which goes onto a solid bar. | |
| This also is a piece of steel. | |
| It should really be aluminum. | |
| This is a lifting force and weight counteracting because it has foam in it, the same foam that we've got on inside here. | |
| And this foil here is shaped to provide lifting force that direction, counteracting any sail force this way, plus provide lifting force against the weight of this structure. | |
| This is probably a little bit heavier than it needs to be. | |
| It's just a stick of wood. | |
| It's used to cantilever the thing forward for storage and pull it up for activation and to stabilize it. | |
| I'm not going to bother with the ropes and stuff at the moment. | |
| We're going to intend to have a live demo of this probably tomorrow. | |
| As you can see, once in place, you have a couple of control ropes to effectively use it like a sail. | |
| It's very lightweight. | |
| The control ropes run forward. | |
| It doesn't obscure your view in any way. | |
| So hopefully it'll be an improvement on a sail structure for kayaks. | |
| And as I say, it's very lightweight. | |
| And also since it's made out of foam and it's rigid, you can use it for a number of different purposes, even when it's lying down. | |
| And if you ever go over and the thing, your kayak breaks up, there you go. | |
| You can float on that bugger for a while. | |
| So just a short little video to show you some of the boat crud we're doing. | |
| Oh, there's that t-shirt. | |
| Okay. | |
| See you guys later. | |
| It's early in the morning here. | |
| Oh, by the way, the whole kayak here is all skin on frame. | |
| It's a 16-ounce ballistic nylon that's been painted with hypalon paint. | |
| This is the second painting in like 20 years. | |
| The first coat was blue. | |
| This is a white and black combo. | |
| This all tied with synthetic sinew up till this year where I've switched over to this rob line, which is a form of Dinell Dux rope that is seriously strong. | |
| I can't break this stuff at all ever. | |
| A single strand will lift my weight in here. | |
| And it's a real nice kayak, really good for racing because of its form. | |
| No rudder or anything. | |
| It has a rear skeg and then the forward skeg for tracking and control. | |
| I think it's about 19, 20 feet long. | |
| Any other specs you're interested in, I can provide. | |
| This is fairly low light, so I don't want to go shoving the camera inside the boat or anything. | |
| And as I say, Kayla and I are going to take it out tomorrow. | |
| Hopefully we'll have the other camera charged up and we can do some longer range video of it on the water with the sail working. | |
| Got to figure out what the tide is going to do to me. |