Solar charged small boat evaluation

Regardless, you'll want to keep your panel weight over your main hull to reduce drag.
A very small outrigger on a long arm is optimal.

A 27 foot, single rowing hull is ideal, like in the video, but move the seat and panels forward to balance the boat better.
Colleges and/or universities need to dispose of old hulls (no hardware) occasionally.
Even damaged is okay as repair is usually straight forward.

 

WF, I don't mind you carrying on here but Bluebells suggestion is sensible. Give the thread a suitable title and people will be able to search for and find it in the future.

 

Alan,

What's up with your project?
Any pictures of what's underneath that beautiful curved roof of yours?

 

Bluebell, the roof will be over the boat in this thread:
Skin on teak boat https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/skin-on-teak-boat.61282/
I kept making mistakes today so I'm sulking. Present job is to put the MPPT and a wattmeter in a waterproof enclosure . I just drilled oversize holes for the cable glands!

 

Ohhhhhh, you're the SOF teak guy.
Nice, very nice.

Oversize, by mistake...?
Sorry to hear that.
Adapt, improvise and overcome.

 

I fixed the oversize holes for cable glands problem (16mm, should be 12mm) just by making some rubber washers that were bigger than the nuts. But before doing that I had to shout and swear, throw my tools around then go and look at youtube for hours.

 

Well played, sulking is never pretty.

So now the cable glands are rubber mounted.
That shouldn't chaffe through now should it.

Are you familiar with silica gel?

 

The picture shows the charger and wattmeter in their waterproof box. I still have to add brackets to hang the box from the gunwale, and connect the cable to the batteries via the speed controller (not shown but seen in an earlier post) via another waterproof cable gland and with a line connector in between so that I can separate the two boxes if necessary.
Then I can finally test the whole solar charged/electric outboard/skin-on-teak boat!

 

Those are some nice, oversized rubber washers there.
What a quality job.

 

Ha ha! handmade, in a bit of a temper, from bicycle inner tube.

 

UPDATE I finally got the solar charged boat up and running. I bought new slightly smaller batteries (2 x 12v 85Ah), mounted the solar roof, but only two thirds of it because I was worried about ultimate stability with the weight of three panels and did some testing. First tests were not great - I forgot the tiller extension and had to use a branch, and the gearbox mod. which was supposed to allow forward and reverse from a forward/neutral gearbox slipped badly. But all was eventually fixed and I spent a pleasant week using it on the Norfolk Broads, UK. Very short video here: