Thread: Beth Sailing Canoe

Wow, love the Beth. One of my favourite boats! Looks fantastic.

Looks great to me. Keep up the good work and post pics of it on the water.

Yes! She looks great! Congratulations!!!

MOAR PICTURES! Everyone loves BETH around here!

Those decks just look so right even in the rough edged state.

MIK

Originally Posted by callsign222

MOAR PICTURES! Everyone loves BETH around here!

Yes! Yes! Yes!!! We want more of pictures!


... and for inducement:

So here are a few more pics. I've been off work the last couple days and got her almost finished. Tomorrow I'll try and rig her outside. I did make one change on the tiller as you can see, but if it doesn't work out I will go back to the original design in the plans. It's just wood so easy enough to modify with the help of some epoxy....
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Got her rigged. Maybe tomorrow for a sail if weather permits.
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Interesting tiller shape. Why did you choose that?

Is It a push pull tiller?

It's a nifty workaround for the mizzen, but I'm not sure the push pull works very well for really quick boats. I've used them a fair bit and they seem best with slower boats with more progressive handling

The curved push pull is pretty neat.

But ... I've been totally wrong before ...

and nothing ventured, nothing gained

The boat really looks super!

MIK

Aha. Of course. He curved it to get it around the mizzen. D'oh.

It should work. Will have very quick steering, but as long as he can handle that it should be ok.

The offset of the rudder head is correct - it is about the same as the original tiller length. It is properly thought through.

The concern I have with push pull is the moment of hesitation about whether you need to pull or push to go in the required direction.

Beth sails on dynamic stability. Upwind isn't too bad as the balance is acheived with a little bit of luffing but mostly sail trim. And as soon as the main is eased the mizzen will tend to push the nose up anyhow.

More of a question downwind when you start moving fast.

Gust comes

Fraction before it hits you drop the nose down a bit and as the boat accelerates in the gust you simultaneously ease sail and bear away to keep the sail full.

Lull comes - keep hiking - trim in sail and point up. It is very dynamic in a narrow boat like BETH. But it is at one extreme of the wind directions and strengths. There might be no problem at all and I am overimagining it.

My big concern when I drew the original system was that I wasn't sure if having rope in the system would make it feel "floppy", less accurate and not nice for serious sailors. We have all been trained (in racing) that rigid and precise is best and most boats should be fitted with a tiller to the rudderhead if possible and that wheels should only be used where there is no other choice.

So I was surprised when the BETH rope system worked pretty well with reasonable precision and feel. Except the time when I didn't tie the rolling hitch adjustment properly and one side came undone on a windy day. It only happened once. I made sure of it!

One really useful tip is that sometimes the rudder lets go going fast downwind. But it will bite again if the mizzen is eased. But the good side of BETH is unlike modern boats where the rudder letting go means a big uncontrollable round up or else bear away into an unintended gybe that BETH goes straight.

Because both ends of the boat are similar shapes it likes to go straight when heeled rather than on conventional boats where the bow becoming a somewhat efficient rudder as the real rudder gets jacked up out of the water. You can have a twin rudder of course, but you are still fighting the tendency of the boat.

MIK

Well the Norwegians use this sort of thing, and they sail like maniacs. I did experiment with a push/pull setup years ago, and I found it was ok because in practice the load on the rudder tells you what to do (most of the time). You're already used to "go against load" to bear away and "go with load" to luff up, so the push/pull isn't as counterintuitive as you might think.

The 16-30 Canoes had a very elegant solution to push/pull tillers, but a little complex to build. What on earth has happened to the 16-30 Canoe beautiful website? It's disappeared!