I think it was Kirby Stevens who said: > To everyone, the "crooked" paddles are called Bent Shaft >paddles. Let's get the jargon right at least. Bob Denton answered: >Mine is a "Modified Crank Shaft" There are several different kinds of bent paddle shafts, and different manufacturers will call them different things in order to reduce copyright, trademark, and patent infringment hassles. I've been using nomenclature as I saw it defined in a Sea Kayaker article on such paddles by Nigel Foster a couple years back. There is a double torque (name orgin?) with two shaft bends for each hand where the shaft portion between your hands does not line up with the blades as a straight shaft paddle does. When you take a stroke, the blade is closer to the stern of the boat than the portion of the shaft between your hands. This puts your hand position slightly behind the blade's center of effort and power strokes (forward) will seem a bit squirrelly, but back strokes are not. A "standard" crank shaft looks like a cam or crank shaft on a car engine in that another bend is added (three total per hand) and the blade is now lined up with the shaft portion between your hands like a straight shaft paddle. This puts your hands in front of the blades for more stable forward stroking, but back stroking is now squirrelly (few sea kayakers will backstroke much, whitewater kayakers do it more). A "modified" crank shaft was, I think, developed by Lettmann (of Germany) and exaggerates the middle bend (still only three bends) so that the blade is again not aligned with the shaft like the double torque. This one, however is the opposite of the double torque. The blade is now closer to the bow of the boat than the portion of the shaft between your hands. This will stabilize forward stroking even more, but really make back stroking squirrelly. Also, high braces will be stable, low braces will be squirrelly. Bob Denton's "modified Crank" may not meet the above criteria -- again, that's manufacturer's definition differences. (I think the term "Crank Shaft" is a Lendal Paddle trademark). I have most of the above info on a Web page at: http://www.paddles.com/library/basics10.html which has some pictures to help visualize it. They need work. I should probably update the two year old text some, too. Hank Hays Lightning Paddles *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed May 12 1999 - 10:30:55 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:08 PDT