Jerry

Continuing to develop the parts for commercial production.  We can now offer a purposed built gearbox that is lighter with three times the torque rating of currently available industrial gearboxes:

Matt Johnson competed in the qualifying leg of the R2AK this year in his pedal boat Rouleur and was the second boat into Victoria:

He entered purely as a pedal boat to reduce weight and windage.  Conditions for the 6 hours to get there favoured human power over sail.  My interest in kites is to power a larger version of this boat with a kite.  Rouleur is a V16 hull with a wider deck to create the cockpit sole.  It is a reasonably secure boat for open water as a pedal boat although it has a large cockpit volume with limited drainage so flooded stability is an issue.  He sleeps in the cockpit with the seat removed.  He has part time studies so only took a few days off to pedal from Seattle up to Port Townsend; stayed there two nights; did the qualifying leg; followed the start of the main event for a few hours then pedalled back to Seattle.  He had enough gear on board to do the five day trip in some comfort.  

Rob Z finally launched his proa Sidecar.  I built a 750W (1HP) electric drive leg for that and he has plans to add a pedal drive of similar dimensions.  He has the added complexity of wanting to go either way while staying seated in the one place because the drive leg is on the lw side of his cockpit:

Rob faired the leg since this video.  A bit more detail on Sidecar here:

Sidecar would do between 2 and 3kts with pedal power depending on the capacity of the engine.

Greg K has built a lightweight version of my V16-62 hull to attempt to regain the 24 hour distance record.  His new boat Libby weighs in at 12.5kg complete with stabilisers and drive.  The 6.2m long hull weighs 5.2kg (I regard it as fragile but he has done maybe 600km on it so far):

This clip is a few months old and water was cold.  The boat is reasonably sorted now and he has been sustaining 10.5kph with 110W input over 80km training days.

Back here I have been doing testing on drive components for a high power sprint pedal boat.  This is for a design optimised around 18kph.  So looking at fixed blade carbon prop and torsionally stiffer carbon shaft than the steel shafts currently being used.  I actually did some low power prop efficiency comparison tests using a printed propeller sheathed with a light layer of carbon.  Blades are only 2mm thick:

It was considerably more efficient than the standard folding prop we supply but we cannot make the blades strong enough at 2mm thick, even in carbon, to take the bending so are going  little thicker.

I have one pedal boat in the MR340 this year.  It is a single - a more robust version of the V16-62.  I fabricated the drive unit for this along the lines of the production pedal frame that is yet to see the light of day.

The production frame uses carbon instead of aluminium.  In the last few years there have been a couple of Twin-8s doing the MR340 and both have had top 10 finishes.  This photo from two years ago at the start:

So pedal boat developments continue and I am having fun playing with these boats and human power. 

Rick

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