The frame of the second prototype St. Lawrence River Skiff is finished. It’s exactly the same weight as the frame of last year‘s prototype but with 5% more scale and 20% more volume. So that’s a decent accomplishment and I’m convinced I can reduce it by another 2 pounds before I run out of places to shave. Additionally I corrected the end shaping on this prototype and I got the information that I needed to correct the sheer on the next one. I’ll probably start the next prototype in a couple week

The second Pedal Drive Canoe prototype is finally finished. You haven’t seen much of this canoe yet because I had to choose between documenting the build for social media and actually creating the video course for how to build it. I really want to push this design over the line this year so I decided on the latter. . This time we decided to go with a small tandem that can also be used solo. Just like with the solo prototype I built this tandem as small as I dared because I need to know where the

Yesterday we tested three different “flipper” drives in the Prototype Pedal Drive Canoe. The first one is a generic copy of the older Hobie design that is no longer under patent protection. At less than half the price of a newer Hobie Mirage drive it’s definitely tempting, but there is a massive difference in speed/efficiency between this and the newer Hobie designs. It feels draggy and is significantly slower than the other models we tested..Next up was the standard Hobie Mirage Drive with kick