Electric fishing canoe

[Willow]

Recently completed a project I started many years ago. It was more of a restoration job, given the amount I had used it prior to having finished it all those years ago.

Hull is plywood coated in Epoxy and 2-pac painted. 12V motor and LiFe pack - forward steering via the foot pedals, and I have rigged up a forward speed control set into the middle seat. Needs an outrigger now that the seats are in and the center of gravity has been raised... if wanting to tackle anything but flat water.



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[justin_le]

I sure like the looks of this!

Any mods done on the outboard motor (either with the prop or the motor controller) or is it complete stock? I'm also curious if you have a watt meter or amp-hour meter to get an idea of your consumption in Wh/km at different cruising speeds. We have lots of firsthand info on this for ebikes and other land vehicles, but very little for light electric watercrafts.

 

[Willow]

I sure like the looks of this!

Any mods done on the outboard motor (either with the prop or the motor controller) or is it complete stock? I'm also curious if you have a watt meter or amp-hour meter to get an idea of your consumption in Wh/km at different cruising speeds. We have lots of firsthand info on this for ebikes and other land vehicles, but very little for light electric watercrafts.

To get speed control from the middle seat I installed another rotary switch mounted in the seat and run a set of 4 new power leads out of the motor and to the new switch. Everything else is stock... it has a voltage readout on the motor and I have a cell monitor on the battery... but don't yet know consumption. I'll steal a CA off one of my bikes and test it next time I'm on the water.

 

[justin_le]

I'll steal a CA off one of my bikes and test it next time I'm on the water.

Sweet. Actually if you do that I'll be willing to donate to you a GPS analogger device so that we can log the actual consumption usage along with the GPS speed and position and such. Then so long as you're out in bodies of water that don't have too much current we can use the trip analyzer web app ( https://www.ebikes.ca/tools/trip-analyzer.html ) and then very easily see the correlation of watts vs. speed for your system, and quantify how any further mods help it.

If you look at the test results from MCDenny in this thread here
https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/efficient-electric-boat.27996/page-17
There's some pretty remarkable improvements he was able to get on a stock Minn Kota trolling motor, going from 330 watts down to 190 watts of power consumption just by changing the stock propeller to an APC RC air propeller, and putting a proper fairing to the vertical shaft. That's a pretty crazy improvement in range with just two simple mods.

 

[Willow]

wow, amazing reduction in consumption. I'll conduct the experiment if you are kind enough to supply the gear - thanks ol'mate.

my biggest enemy is wind... there is a river close by with no current, but it will also need to be dead still. The prop is the standard 2 blade model it came with.... I'll see what else is on offer.

 

[justin_le]

wow, amazing reduction in consumption. I'll conduct the experiment if you are kind enough to supply the gear - thanks ol'mate.

OK glad to hear that you're game. Send me an email (info @ ebikes.ca) and we'll sort the details from there since I think this is firsthand info that would be of great interest to have shared on this forum for other people exploring electric boat builds.

my biggest enemy is wind... there is a river close by with no current, but it will also need to be dead still.

Yes and no, it's possible to go back and forth or in circles and then we would average out the data. It doesn't perfectly cancel out but at least it reduces to a large degree the offset caused by wind. Also if you move perpendicular to the wind during the trial runs that works too.

 

[dodjob]

I'll steal a CA off one of my bikes and test it next time I'm on the water.

Sweet. Actually if you do that I'll be willing to donate to you a GPS analogger device so that we can log the actual consumption usage along with the GPS speed and position and such. Then so long as you're out in bodies of water that don't have too much current we can use the trip analyzer web app ( https://www.ebikes.ca/tools/trip-analyzer.html ) and then very easily see the correlation of watts vs. speed for your system, and quantify how any further mods help it.

If you look at the test results from MCDenny in this thread here
https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/efficient-electric-boat.27996/page-17
There's some pretty remarkable improvements he was able to get on a stock Minn Kota trolling motor, going from 330 watts down to 190 watts of power consumption just by changing the stock propeller to an APC RC air propeller, and putting a proper fairing to the vertical shaft. That's a pretty crazy improvement in range with just two simple mods.

ThanKS Justin! I'm currently in the trip did you get any feedback from OP?
I know, old thread.. still totally actual for me and I'm pretty surprised there is so less ES madness here

 

[justin_le]

ThanKS Justin! I'm currently in the trip did you get any feedback from OP?
I know, old thread.. still totally actual for me and I'm pretty surprised there is so less ES madness here

Nothing at all from the OP unfortunately but the offer still stands if he's listening! In the meantime though I've been making good headway on a hub motor to replace a diesel inboard on a sailboat project which I plan to post about here soon. There does need to be more ES madness around electric boats!

 

[dodjob]

ThanKS Justin! I'm currently in the trip did you get any feedback from OP?
I know, old thread.. still totally actual for me and I'm pretty surprised there is so less ES madness here

Nothing at all from the OP unfortunately but the offer still stands if he's listening! In the meantime though I've been making good headway on a hub motor to replace a diesel inboard on a sailboat project which I plan to post about here soon. There does need to be more ES madness around electric boats!

Hey,
Missed the notification
Just to let you know that I started my little project (2-3kWw brushless trolling motor)
This with the sailboat conversion is a dream I keep for the future I've got some pretty cool ideas for that
That said, if you happen to find time to push a bit of info on what you did, that would be pretty awesome. Justin in the E-boat field, that's pretty cool
R
Gruß,
H.

 

[justin_le]

That said, if you happen to find time to push a bit of info on what you did, that would be pretty awesome. Justin in the E-boat field, that's pretty cool

Don't want to hijack Willow's original thread but until I start my own here's a little teaser! We pulled out the 8Hp Yanmar engine earlier this summer with the plans to give it an overhaul since it was gulping down oil, and thought it would be a fun project to convert it to a parallel hybrid. Then we could use electric going in and out of the Marina for day sails, while still having diesel for longer trips. But after disassembling everything we realized that the wear on the main crank bearing and crank shaft was well outside the limits and repairing that is gonna be $$$, so we might instead scrap that idea and just go pure electric.


We were hoping that we'd be able to do this with ebike hub motors, and a quick test fit showed that there was _just_ enough clearance of our Grin motor to fit on the end of the shaft and clear the hull of the boat with no transmission.



So I went build up a custom version of the motor with a machined steel axle that had a matching flange to the shaft and which could support a thrust bearing on the end to handle the forwards push of the propeller, that way the motor bearings themselves wouldn't really have any load.



The side view here shows a bit more clearly. In order to have sufficient RPM with a 72V battery pack I took the fastest motor wind that we have (5 turns, ~12 rpm/V) and reconfigured it so that we could run it in delta mode (~20 rpm/V) that's why there are 6 phase wires instead of 3. The steel axle through the middle is rotating and the original plan was to mate the output of that to the diesel engine.

View attachment 1

It's been stalled at that state for the past several months as we're still a long way from the next sailing season, but I'm sure keen to jump back on this and start a proper build thread to share the details and experience.

 

[DogDipstick]

Get your own thread, Punk.

Lol. Not brushless.. but....

We are building an electric/steam hybrid ECE. Oil burner with 180Ah of 12v lipo. Quite a bit of heat. Single stage turbine. We considered an electrical high temp pressure washer for teh boiler, and being pure electric... But that is another story for another time.... We are starting with the oil burner to make the steam.

It gonna be faster than your boat, friend. Looking forward to your thread, Justin. I'll surly post mine if we ever get ours done.

I like boats. Ours is a 19" Flying Scot with a prop tube installed and centerboard cut out.

 

[dodjob]

Y E S! )
The idea I had is the first one you intended (Hybrid-Diesel)
Made a lot of calculations concerning boat consumption, solar generation/vs area and asked anybody willing to answer about their needs for propulsion in real life.
After all this, I thought there were no way to have pure electric on a boat without being a real handicap. For a small and fast little boat for dailly, WE use, that may be manageable BUT absolutely not for a cruiser (which is my target)
Seeing that you want to use it on a small mono, you don't want to go that fast right? I'm surprised that you want to run it at 72V + Delta.. why not using a diam/pitch = 1 and increase the diameter to have a slow rpm turbine?
Torqeedo is using a 33cm propeller with 10"-12" pitch on their trolling 2-4kW there must be a reason for that
Hadrien

 

[Bullfrog]

Willow...what battery voltage did you use and did you drop it before it got to the motor using a DCC converter? I am considering doing something similar to what you did with a 12' JON boat and using a 52v Li Ion battery.

Another option for my 12' JON boat is to start with a DD bike motor similar to what Justin did and triangulate a mount on the back of the boat and have a straight shaft with the motor on one end and the prop on the other end and just make it long enough to extend the prop to the proper depth/angle.

A 2.5 hp Yamaha outboard produced enough power to get my hull to plane with just me in the boat so I am thinking if I do this correctly I should be able to get it to plane using the DD motor...which will reduce the wetted area of the hull and reduce the power consumption.

Any suggestions/comments based on what you guys have encountered would be appreciated .

 

[Bullfrog]

Just started learning about Rim Driven Propellers.

Here is a good introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te_xejpriFM

Basically a Direct Drive electric motor with fins :lol: .