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.
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| Okay, boaters. | |
| Boat nuts everywhere. | |
| This is a quick look at a prototype of the sail blade for my kayak. | |
| We're out here in uh uh Grow Dome. | |
| I'm using my GoPro camera on this because my other one doesn't have a charge. | |
| Uh this dome is in too much shade to be used for gardening, and it's gonna be disassembled and relocated uh when we move here. | |
| In the meantime, it's being used for the uh purpose of constructing our little uh structure here. | |
| Um 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, has a tendency to drive the bow down, especially in oncoming seas of any height at all. | |
| So uh for a number of reasons. | |
| I went ahead and built a mizzen-based uh 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 skig, which is usually um uh 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 um effort directly into the uh area of my main paddle reach. | |
| Uh then this um mizen-based sail structure here called a sail blade for lack of a better term, um, is going to also pull my center of effort back, should raise my bow uh slightly, especially for beaching if I'm beaching under sail. | |
| The structure folds up uh relatively easily. | |
| It's all built as um foam, folds up as you see. | |
| It's a number of ropes to uh pull it to get it to activate. | |
| It's behind the area uh that of my swing, so even especially flat, but even uh extended, I won't be bashing into it. | |
| I have two control ropes, one on each side of the thing for swinging the uh foil. | |
| You'll notice that the foil is atypical. | |
| This is a crude um model. | |
| I did all of this by the way, in about six hours. | |
| Uh the paint job is crap, uh, but the foil is sealed with resin. | |
| This is a form of a foil known as an uh Model 4 uh KF or Klein Fogelman foil. | |
| It's made out of um uh spider foam uh that has uh hundred pounds list lifting force and is reinforced longitudinally within the foam. | |
| It was just sawed, it has some three-ounce uh fiberglass cloth on it and some quick cure um uh phenolic resin uh to keep it all watertight. | |
| It's mounted on a single shaft, which is uh goes onto a solid bar. | |
| Uh this also is a piece of steel, it should really be aluminum. | |
| This is a uh lifting force and weight counteracting uh because it has foam in it, the same uh 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 uh to stabilize it. | |
| I'm not gonna bother with the ropes and stuff at the moment. | |
| We're gonna intend to have a live demo of this in a uh probably tomorrow. | |
| Uh as you can see, once in place, uh you have a couple of control ropes to effectively use it like a sail. | |
| Uh it's very lightweight, the control ropes run forward, doesn't obscure your view in any way. | |
| So hopefully it'll be an improvement on a sail structure for uh kayaks. | |
| And uh 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 uh if you ever go over and the thing your kayak breaks up, there you go. | |
| Float 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, uh see you guys later. | |
| Uh 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 hypolon uh paint. | |
| Uh this is the second painting uh in like 20 years. | |
| The first coat was blue. | |
| Uh, this is a white and black combo. | |
| Uh this all tied with synthetic um uh resin or synthetic sinew up till this uh year where I've switched over to this uh Rob line, which is a form of Dynell Duke's rope that's uh is uh seriously strong. | |
| I can't break this stuff at all ever. | |
| A single strand will lift my weight in here. | |
| And it's uh it's a real nice uh kayak, really good for racing because of its form, no rudder or anything, it has a rear skeg and then the forward skeg for uh tracking and control. | |
| I think it's about 19-20 feet long. | |
| Any other specs you're interested in, I can provide. | |
| Uh this is fairly low light, so I don't want to go shoving the camera inside the boat or anything. | |
| And uh as I say, we're gonna Kayla and I are gonna take it out tomorrow. | |
| Hopefully, we'll have the other camera charged up and we can do some uh longer range video of it on the water with the uh sail working. | |
| Gotta figure out what the tide is gonna do to me. |