With a “knee rest”, you can sit more relaxed and get better control.
read on for fitting instructions.
Some blah blah first:
When i go boating with friends, Physically, i am often the weakling of the group. Still, it seems that others get tired faster than me. I think my boat fitting has to do with it.
It was in 1998 or 1999, when i had a Prototype of Eskimo’s ZWO, that was so wide (over 70cm!), it could never fit me. So i started to glue in and cut more and more foam, until i came to a point, where the foam in the knee area also supported the outside of my knee from below.
It felt similar to the paddler-boat connection i had in my squirt boat, where you don’t have to hold the boat with the legs/knees, because the boat just fits like a glove.
From that day on, all my boats had this outside knee support, in different variations of length and angle. There emerged some approaches from manufacturers to that same goal as well, but i think they all had drawbacks, and over time i came up with the following system:
Fitting your boat with Knee rest:
i take/make a more or less square cube of foam, around 10 x 10 x 15cm edge
length, then i cut it short side diagonally in two, so i get lengthy triangles.
depending on the boats shape and the softness of the foam, i cut into
the largest surface, which will go onto the boat, so it can easyer adapt the boats shape.
a short side, or if there is a shortest side, will touch my knees outside.
Now i sit in, put the blocks in place, and mark the area.
Now i can glue them in with contact adhesive.
most probably, they will not be perfectly in the right place, so i cut them down or build them up, eg. with the thin, self-adhesive foam that comes with your pyranha…
now have fun, and tell me, if you’re really doing it longer and better.
tips:
- for testing, you can place the foam with double sided tape, but my experience is, that it will fall out after a few paddling sessions in the best case.
- remember that with all your paddling gear on, the fittings made for you in your shorts might be too tight.
- Problems with glueing? cleaning with alcohol, and then a primer of contact adhesive on both boat and foam, which you let rest for a hour or so, before applying the second layer for glueing can help.
- Also, a little roughing up with sandpaper of the boats affected area can improve the bond of your glue.