Here's how one person with decades of structural analysis experience and zero experience with canoes or marine engineering designed, constructed, and tested a pair of 14-foot canoes that weigh less than 30 lbs each.

Brooks Mitchell has been a devoted fan of NEi Nastran and Femap since 2000. He has used other pre/post processors and solvers, but just doesn’t like them. In the summer of 2009 he became, in his words, “obsessed with having a canoe.” Yet, he had no knowledge of marine engineering and shipbuilding.

The project began with web research and the purchase of a couple of books on canoe features, materials, etc. to learn what he needed to purchase. It didn’t take long before Brooks was learning new terms like chines, prismatic coefficients, and others. After taking a short trip with a neighbor in the hopes of getting the obsession...read more