Friday 25 October 2013

October 25, 2013

Last Sunday I took the Chameleon out for it's final run of the season and this time I had it set up with two seats and drive units. No other mechanical changes were made. The boat performed quite well with two people and fortunately it was also choppier than I have seen previously. Got splashed a little but it handled better than expected and still had lots of reserve buoyancy. (the other rider also weighs 50-60 pounds less than I do...) The hulls certainly cut through waves easily and there seems to be little effect on boat speed. I never did manage to get a GPS out with me so the numbers next year will have to come from buoy to buoy measurements again just to compare.

I have a new lighter frame drawn up and most of the materials so it should be ready to test in early spring. I will post here when there is something to show.......

Also setting up a website so once I get it up and running I will place a link here.

Cheers,

Glen


Friday 11 October 2013

Perfect day


On Sunday September  I set out at around 7:30 from Mahone Bay and headed towards Chester. Lots of islands, shoals, rocks, marker buoys and absolutely glassy smooth for almost two hours. This photo was taken around 1 pm on the lee side of Round Island but the windward side doesn't look much different since the wind never did come up. Not the usual scenario for this area. 
Prior to this trip I had moved the prop shaft support from it's previous location at the prop, to just below the trailing edge of the deck. It was hanging from a pieces of 1/16 ss wire ( which I keep meaning to put a teeeeeny fairing on ) and when I pedaled through weeds they would catch on the wire and get wound around the prop. The entire unit would become one and start winding the wire around the shaft and bring the prop up out of the water. The support was riding on a ss stub shaft that holds the prop but this time I just have a ss shell with plastic bushing running right on the aluminum shaft. The only time the shaft is supported is if I stop pedaling, the rest of the time the prop determines the dept of the shaft and the support wire is slack. Moving this forward has stopped the weed problem almost entirely!!!!! The last two outings have not required a single prop clearing event. In fact, only twice have I had to lift the prop and pedal backwards to flip them off.

The other change was to the steering. Still very wire and duct tape-ish but it shows that the system will work better than what I had before. 

One of the folks on the boat design forum viewed one of my videos and referred to the speed as pretty underwhelming.........hard to even pretend to be insulted by that since I feel the same way!! With the current gearing and a 16 x 8 or 10 prop I can keep about 4 to 4.5 knots for an hour but if I want to be out all day 3.5 is more realistic. Yup, not as fast as I would like or hoped for. But I went 40 kilometers on Sunday which is pretty good but I could barely stand up when I got back.......took me several days to recover!

About the only thing I can do now to increase my speed is to reduce weight. Off me and the boat. Now if I can just stop fueling with crap that would be about 15 pounds.....
The frame and drive systems are fairly good now so I will make a new frame without all the double joints and pins etc. Probably use 1.5" sch 40 aluminum pipe instead of the 2.5 square tube, use a lighter deck, and thinner wall cross bars. Once I am comfortable on the boat I can cut back on the tools and spares etc I carry. 

Before winter I want to get at least one hull so I can use it separately with a small set of floats and haywire a drive system to it. Just to see if there is any potential there for an interesting turn of speed.

And if I can figure out how to get another thread started here I will start to talk about my trimaran plans!!