Fixing Royalex (IE stuff that canoes are made of)

[sbsbw]

So i saw the tread in Misc-Boat Related about a "snow row"

So i said hey i know about that.

You see some friends of mine (and I) were in the process of making a movie (the oddessy) and we diceded that a nice action seen with us taking out a canoe and going sledding with it would be good. You see in the true nature of Odisius we were not that good at navigating, and managed to have trouble with figuring out where the rock garden was. we were going down and the canoe went BUMP!!! and then contueded down, when we got to the bottom of the hill we found that the back of the canoe was filled with snow. it was then we found out what the bump was, it was a large rock putting a hole in the back of the cannoe.

So does anybody have any ideas of how to fix a royalex canoe.

it would be ... helpfull to het some advice.

otherwise i'm going to be doin some pretty intgerestin things with fiberglass.

-SBSBW

[ 03-09-2005, 08:22 PM: Message edited by: sbsbw ]

[Bruce Hooke]

I think it's Royalex that your are dealing with. This websites have some good information:

http://mohawkcanoes.com/care.htm (scroll down)

http://www.myccr.com/SectionGear/GearTips/RoyalexHeatG un.htm (http://www.myccr.com/SectionGear/GearTips/RoyalexHeatGun.htm)

http://www.aquabatics.com/articles/article.asp?ID=20

The first site has the best detail on how to actually do the work on anything from deep scratches to simple creases. The last one is more of an overview but talks about how to deal with actual holes. The middle one mostly talks about creases.

The gist of the situation is, as I understand it, that marine epoxy will stick to scuffed Royalex, and that fiberglass will work as reinforcing, or if lightness is key then kevlar might be better...

[ 03-09-2005, 07:05 PM: Message edited by: Bruce Hooke ]

[Bruce Hooke]

BTW -- Dang you must have hit that rock hard. Royalex is damn hard to break. Are you sure you didn't run into something metal?

[sbsbw]

thanks for the spelling correctionion, as a note to those who view this later I am correction the orginal post including the thread line

also I know it was a rock, i saw it sticking up out of the snow after we hit it, it seems we misestimated how much snow there was,

it problebly didn't help that we had five...six...seven? people in the canoe

[Todd Bradshaw]

You patch Royalex using fiberglass cloth and a special epoxy resin formulated to stick to the ABS and vinyl. It will stick better than typical boatbuilding epoxies. You can get it from Old Town Canoe. They also have matching spray paint to help hide the finished patch if it happens to be one of their boats or one from another manufacturer that might have used the same color sheets from Uniroyal.

[sbsbw]

on the scale of injurys to a canoe (or a boat) i would tend to say that this is more of a titanic type hole.

that is to say that this is not a puncture, this is a full born gash

i think that a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe i'll be able to get a hold of a picture for this.

-sbsbw

[Bruce Hooke]

Yah, with 5+ people in the canoe I can see where that would increase the force of the impact by quite a bit! :eek:

What you may want to try is the following: first use a heat gun to try to restore as much as you can of the messed up areas around the hole. This may allow you to save sections that you thought you would have to cut away. Then you can focus on actually filling the remaining gap. A key stage in the process will be creating a smooth temporary backer that spans the gap.

[sbsbw]

yeah about that,

i'm guessing that i have about 1/2 square ft of open area and then an adrtional 1.5 to 2 sqare ft of compromised area.

the problem is scraping, it is cracking around the hole,

i think that a picture will do a lot.

this is not the kinda thing that you would put it in the water with, well you could, it would just be full of water before you could even sit in it.

:confused:

:( -SBSBW

[Bruce Hooke]

Ouch! :eek:

Actually, that sounds managable to me, but not a lot of fun. I wonder if a multi-stage approach as follows might make sense:

1) Restore the shape of the compromised areas, adding temporary bracing if necessary to hold it in right position for the next step. Ignore cracks in the compromised area for now.

2. Patch the actual hole.

3. Go back and deal with the cracks and gouges in the compromised area now that the overall surface has been stablized and brought back into position.

But in the end a lot of this will come down to experimenting to figure out what areas can be save and what must be cut away...

Good luck. It will be interesting to see the pictures.

[sbsbw]

Thats the genneral plan that I had, i think my bigst problem is going to be patching the hole, I don't know if just fiberglass/kevlar will be strongenough for the application.

[Bruce Hooke]

Remember that fiberglass can make a fine canoe all on its own, so if you do a good job it should be plenty strong enough. It may just take a few layers of glass cloth to build up the thickness you need. Of course that area will always be a bit more brittle than the Royalex, but there is not much you can do about that (other than not sledding in this canoe in the future! :D ).