The International Canoe

During the Worlds, Chris and I spent some time chatting about what type of design would be most helpful for advancing the IC.
One idea that came up was a design that allowed the direct transfer of a "standard" Nethercott seat carriage and seat. "Standard" is in quotes because nothing about canoes is standard, but a typical moving seat carriage on a Nethercott is in the order 920mm wide. A hull could be designed that would allow the beam at deck level to be wide enough to accept the fore and aft tracks but could be minimum weight and very much slipperier than a Nethercott.
There are some problems with this, in that most Nethercott seat carriages have been de facto corrector weights for 20 years or more and as such are massively overbuilt, but as a strategy what is the view? Is this a worthwhile avenue to investigate? Or is the opinion that anyone who is going to build a new boat isn't going to compromise any aspect of the design in order to recycle parts.
Think about is and respond.
SHC

I'm certainly proposing to recycle 257s current plank on the new boat I'm mulling over for this winter, but its ex Tin Teardrop with the carriage adapted for the wider beam of the Nethercott so that doesn't count... It probably depends what you have in the garage: I have 2 planks (one heavy, one not dreadful) and 1 or two carriage assemblies (I forget whether there are two or whether I broke the heavy one) so I can sell 257 as a complete boat when the new one is ready even if I keep the best plank. I think that's the key thing about recycling: no point in recycling a plank if it then means you haven't got a whole boat to sell to help pay off the bank loan or however you financed the new build... So people like me who are forever tinkering and tend to acquire bits and pieces are more likely to be interested than someone who just gets a boat, then another boat.

However a wider dance floor is something I have been wondering about anyway... Lacking, as I do, the level of natural sailing talent of most of the rest of you I need all the help I can get and a few more inches for power if not quick enough onto the plank might help. It certainly seems as if the wide stern I have on 257 has helped my competitiveness in club racing: I've just started picking up the odd decent result and fewer and smaller mistakes seems a more likely explanation than extra boat speed.

Or switching over ALL of the gear from a nice but no longer competitive Nethercott might make it easier and far cheaper to get into the new boat. Seat, carriage, rig, foils, maybe deck hardware could be transferred. The new boat could have close to the same shroud base. I think the structural issues of having the dance floor cantilever out past the hull could be dealt with and, to my eye at least, the new boat would look really cool.

But there's not much incentive to pursue this over the winter if there's not interest.

I've also been working on a design which has a wider dance floor aft and I was intending to recycle my Nethercott seat and carriage (although my carriage is not that hard to modify to make it narrower). After watching the new boats being sailed, I think it could be quite beneficial to flare the hull out to provide a wider deck, allowing a bigger margin for error . Also, with a concave curved deck, making it wider allows you to get the dance floor lower whilst reducing the steepness of the curve towards the gunwhales.