chris jung wrote:
Hi,
When we bought our house, it came with an Old Town canoe in the backyard.
We were told by our then tenants that it was owned by a previous tenant and
he was planning to come back for it. It's been 4.5 years and it's still
here and we've occasionally taken it out for small jaunts on the local
waterways (we're in the Finger Lakes region of NY). Last winter during a
wind storm, it was lifted up and whacked against a spruce tree which cracked
it midway on the left side, from the top of the gunwale to about 12-16." No
pieces of the hull are missing, though the plastic covering the top of the
gunwale wall is broken and missing sections.
We are pondering on whether it's worth repairing and how hard it would be to
fix it. We are not sure what kind of material it's made of. I went on Old
Town website but couldn't match it up to any of the current models (no
surprise). It's serial number is gone and so is any other name, except for
the "Old Town" label on the sides. Looking at the cross section of the
break, it looks like a layer of plastic, a layer of stiff foam and another
layer of plastic. This canoe is light blue on the outside, beige/putty
colored on the inside.
This is Old Town's common sandwich molded construction, used in several
models. The color scheme matches a similar common canoe that I have, an
Old Town Discovery. It could be any of several others, such as the
Tripper, as Riverman said.
http://www.oldtowncanoe.com/canoes/product_list.html
Old Town usually places the model name on the outside of the bow,
usually on the one or both sides, just below the gunwale. They use
adhesive letter decals. Look closely; if the decals are missing, there
may still be enough traces of adhesive to read the name.
It's pretty generic in shape and style. While we are
fixing it, we would also want to replace the plastic that covers up the top
of the gunwale walls.
We already have a different canoe that my husband & son use for fishing (an
aluminum square back Sports Pal). The Sports Pal is a nice canoe x boat
(it's sort of a hybrid) but since it's aluminum we're hesitant to take it in
rocky situations. The thought is that if we fix the Old Town for a
reasonable price, it could be used for times when we might liked to go down
a local creek.
So is an old Old Town canoe worth fixing? Is there a point where a crack is
too severe to be safely fixed?
Based on your description, this boat is almost certainly worth fixing.
However, the hull is probably significantly weakened, so you should
probably avoid a lot of rock bashing. Try it out on your "local creek";
I expect that it will not fail catastrophically in a place described as
mildly as that. ;-)
Any idea of what kind of Old Town canoe it is
in terms of materials?
Old Town has several different sandwich formulations. They have changed
the hull material at least once in the Discovery line. My 1999 catalog
says that Discovery's were "Crosslink3", polyethylene based, that year.
This could easily be a Royalex boat too, like Riverman said.
The bad thing about polyethylene is that repair adhesives *really* don't
like to stick to it. You really want a solid gunwale to back up the
repair of the type of vertical crack that you described.
My digital camera charger is MIA but when I find it
I can put up some photos if that would help. And if we do fix it, would it
be ethical to claim it as our own?
After 4.5 years? Did you sign a contract agreeing to store the boat
rent-free indefinitely? I didn't think so. It's probably yours, but
inquire locally about abandoned property laws. At least fix it and get
some fun out of it. In the unlikely event that the original owner comes
around later, at least charge them for all of your repair expenses. I
bet a court would back you up at least that far.
--Dave
"Please reply to the newsgroup!"
And if we decide it's too difficult for
us to fix, should we scrap it or donate it? And if we donated it - who to?
Are their any liability issues with donating a cracked canoe?
Chris in lovely Ithaca NY