Fiberglassing wood strip sea kayaks. After all filling and. You will be surprised how much dust is still left. If you press fresh tack cloth into the surface. Genuine Indiana Brand Canoe info Posted by. Below is info I discovered on the 3 layer hull they refer to in the industry as the 'Sandwich approach.'. Canoe & kayak repair kits. Fix broken gel coat, install kevlar skid plates, repair holes in roylex and kevlar hulls, replace broken canoe seats. Sea kayak construction methods (1). Apparently it is a five-layer sandwich with.Older and dustier tack. OK. Using dusty cloth for varnishing is a different. The deck here is covered with 4oz. Positioning the fabric efficiently is important. Somewhere south of freezing, the plastic body of the canoe shrinks while the dampish wooden gunwales expand. Unless the screws affixing the inwale and outwale are backed out, they pin a shrinking hull to an expanding gunwale, and something will give. That something is always the hull. So it wasn't a good sign in spring 2. Paul called to ask Stan, ? Mad River Canoe Care and Repair Before You Use Your New Canoe The wood gunwales of your Mad River Canoe were treated at the factory with three. Uniroyal’s Royalex is a bonded sandwich of ABS plastic and foam. Salt Pond Visitor Center is Cape Cod National Seashore's main visitor facility, with a theater, bookstore, museum, and restrooms. Paul, lucky guy that he is, received a 1. Mad River Royalex Freedom with wooden gunwales as a wedding gift. Paul spends his winters in Montana's Blackfoot Valley which, to put it mildly, gets darn cold in the winter. Luckily, Paul had heard that he should back the screws out of the gunwales before winter hit. Unluckily, he didn't back them out far enough. His description was, . Stan, buffered from the reality of the thing by 8. In the words of a normally upbeat boatbuilding friend, . Many canoe manufactures employ Royalex to fashion a tough, attractive boat suitable for whitewater paddling. Royalex is relatively difficult to repair (everything about it resists adhesion), and our standard clunky epoxy- fiberglass tape repairs would have added six- plus ounces per crack, or somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty pounds, to the canoe. The Freedom is a pricey, sweet, moving- water canoe, and we thought it would be worth saving if there was a way to do so—besides, Bruce is retired and Stan is gullible. Our pal, Rob Monroe of Gougeon Brothers, was in Montana for his annual ski trip and thought he might have a new epoxy that could be just the ticket. The new epoxy (which turned out to be G/flex), was attractively labeled . So, hooked on science and with Rob's help and encouragement, we got started on the job. Prepping the wreck. We began by cradling the broken boat in slings—short sawhorse- height stands made for the purpose—and removed the breastplates, gunwales, seats, and thwarts. Without gunwales holding the hull together, the canoe flexed like a snake on muscle relaxants. After the canoe was stripped down to just the hull material, we drilled and countersunk the bottom of each crack so the cracks wouldn't get any longer, following the procedure used for cracks in metal. We followed this with either the corner of a 1. The file/chisel work was really fun, particularly when the corner of the tool would merrily skitter across the canoe, leaving decorative gouges, and we'd cheerfully cry out, . The expanded crack made it easier to squeeze in a bead of G/flex 6. Adhesive and gave the glue a larger and keyed surface adequate for adhesion. After drilling and countersinking the end of each crack, we used a saber saw to widen each crack prior to beveling, rounding the edges. The glue job. On Rob's advice, we took care to leave the sheer untouched. We clamped each crack along the sheer to maintain the canoe's factory shape; we began each saw cut in the crack about an inch below the sheer. If we had cut from the sheer down, we would have removed a saw's width 2. By puckering the sheer (inducing rocker), we would have made it difficult to return the canoe to its original shape. It's good to have smart friends—Bruce and Stan probably wouldn't have thought of this. To keep glue off the garage floor, we used cheap clear packaging tape as a backing on the outside of the canoe, and loaded our syringe with nearly bubble- free G/flex using WEST SYSTEM. Clamps along the sheer held the now very floppy hull in its original shape. From the inside of the cradled canoe, we injected each crack with straight G/flex, taking special care to force the epoxy to the bottom and along the edges of each crack. We ran tape over the wet epoxy to control slumping, to try to create a smooth surface and to preserve a smooth garage floor. After a few trial cracks, it became clear that it was easier to get something close to a flush surface on the outside of the boat by pressing with a gloved finger along the outside tape as the glue was applied to the inside. After the G/flex cured, we ripped the tape off inside and out. Epoxy isn't champagne, and bubbles just don't add much except possible areas of failure. Come to think of it, after a lot of champagne, the bubbles here too add possible areas of failure. Finishing Following these repairs, the hull was rigid again, and we went back to square one, opening up the previously uncut crack from the sheer to the screw holes (usually about an inch of cracked hull), and filled it with G/flex using the same technique as described above. We used spring clamps and C- clamps to keep the hull from deforming side- to- side as we glued up these short cracks. Afterwards, we used a small rotary file chucked in a Dremel. Each repair showed bright yellow against the turquoise hull. We had lacked the wit to weigh the boat before our repair, but our best estimate is that our G/flex repair added perhaps a pound or two to the canoe. We coated the wooden gunwales with mixture of equal parts varnish, boiled linseed oil, and mineral spirits, and added a drop or two of Japan drier to speed things along. New color- coordinated bow and stern loops completed this extreme canoe makeover. The test drive Stan and Glenda Bradshaw in the freshly repaired Mad River Freedom 1. Royalex canoe —repaired with G/flex Epoxy. I took the picture in August, 2. Blackfoot River near Ovando, Montana a couple of miles downstream of the Roundup Bar. After re- attaching the breastplates, thwarts, seats, and gunwales, we thought it was time to test our repair. It was August, low- water time on Montana's Blackfoot River. Our favorite whitewater stretch was running clear, low, and very boney—there were rocks everywhere. Given the number of cracks repaired, Bruce thought we had at least a 5. Stan and his wife Glenda take first crack at padding the repaired boat. Like tipsy ranchers at a grange dance, they slid over and bounced off more than a few rocks while dancing down a six- mile Class II+/III- stretch of enjoyable waves and eddies. To our amazement and considerable relief, the repair held. There wasn't even a hint of failure. We had a grand day on the water, and G/flex proved to be a great way to cheat the Dumpster and put a busted- up canoe back on the water.
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