Greetings Wally!!

Do you know if anyone has ever designed or built a two seat Ice Flyer Classic? Is it a feasible design? What would be some of the balance/CG challenges? Would you need a larger sail becuase of the weight?

Thanks for any insight you can give.

BA

Hi Bob

I haven't seen any two seat versions of the Ice Flyer Classic, but as a builder, I can see the challenges. First of all, since you will be sitting off center, the foot steering system will not work well. I would use a tiller steering system like that in the DN. This would allow your to steer from either side. With the double width you would have to beef up the floor of the boat, possibly using stringers fore and aft along with some cross supports. Lastly, you will need a longer plank...at least 10 feet long. Personally, I would come up with a entirely new design, possibly based on the Gambit...a two seat version of the DN.

If you do not plan to sail with two people all the time, you could add a side car to a single seat version. You would need a beefier plank for the extra weight, but they do work well on other boats. It's an option I'm looking at for my boat. (I have one on my DN).

Hopefully we will hear from someone who has built one.

I agree that the Ice Flyer has some problems with a two person design.

Side cars normally rest on the rear plank and on the Ice Flyer, the rear plank is fairly far to the rear. Since Ice Flyer was a comercial interest, safety has had a fair amount of influence on the design so one goal was to make sure that when you put your foot out to stop the boat, you didnt have risk of it getting "rolled" under the rear plank. But having the plank way to the rear probably presents some problems for supporting a side car and you would have to make sure it didnt damage the foil.

As was also pointed out, the foot steering presents another problem if you have side by side seating. You possibly could build one with a tiller and I dont see any reason not too - except that when your really "jamming" the turning, its really nice to have foot steering and once again from a safety aspect, the footsteering two pushrod system has a redundant backup in case one side fails.

But.. for the side by side, maybe you could use a tiller or maybe some sort of foot pedal arrangment that could be offset to one side. And maybe for the side car, the passenger sits back to the rear a little more. I think I prefer the side car simply because it can be removed for those really good (wild..) days

Who knows???

Forget to add something.

On balance, you dont want the CG of the boat moving too far forward. Currently the CG of the boat is just behind your "tail bone" and the boat should be set up with this CG location to have equal weight on all three runners. The mast downward pressure is just behind the CG so that under all conditions, the the front runner weight is either equal to or less than the rear runner weigth to maintain the more stable understeer.

I suspect that two people side by side might shift the CG a little bit forward of what it currently is on the Ice Flyer but you could balance this by increasing the lenght of the front spring board (maybe about a foot?).

I think the side car idea would likely have the passenger weight back more and this would shift the boats CG back which should be no problem.

When you put two persons in a boat, they generally dont go in as light of wind. You can get some really huge windsurfing sails (up to 12.5 m**2) but Im not sure about going this big - but Ive also never tried anything larger than a 9.0 mm*2 since this for me has given some really good light wind performance but will still perform well when the wind picks up. Even with a stiffened mast, I think the really big sails would distort a lot so might not be much of a benifit except in the real light wind.

We are currently producing one made of wood. Look for us at copake lake!