Al D wrote in
:

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006 19:13:12 GMT, John Fereira
wrote:

Steve Cramer wrote in news:VzZmg.440$M_7.289
:

I tried to find some info because I've never heard of the stuff. All
the sites Google pulled up were in the UK, and buying a plastic canoe
from a dealer in the UK if you live in the US can't be clever.
Nothing about Brits, but they're 3K miles from here and you can't
even make it a road trip.

That certainly hasn't seemed to influence the popularity of VCP (or
whatever they're called now), NDK, or P&H kayaks in the U.S.

Personally, I'm always a bit leary of new composite layups touted as
the latest thing since sliced bread since the technology has been
proven. Given that the lifespan of a kayak can easily surpass ten
years (my glass VCP Skerray is 17 years old and still paddles quite
nicely) I'd be pretty ****ed if I bought a new kayak only to find out
that the hot new composite layup delaminates after a couple of years.

Thanks for the input. The danger of delaminating hadn't occurred to
me. What I am mostly concerned about is that the outer skin of plastic
is quite thin, I'm told... (thinner than on a canoe made of solid
plastic) - so I am worried about that outer skin wearing through,
after beaching the canoe enough times on shingle. That polyethelene
plastic (if that's what it is) seems very prone to deep scratching.

A friend of mine has a few canoes in his rental fleet that are some sort of
plastic-foam laminate and a couple of them have a fairly large area near the
bow and stern where the outer plastic layer is scraped off. In this case,
it appears that the outer layer is just a colored layer covering a thicker
layer of some other material which provides structural integrity.

I'm also concerned about the inner core of foam being crushable, say,
when a heavy person steps into the canoe while it's on dry land.

But it's a relief to hear that such laminates have been in use in the
US for years. That suggests to me they must be suitable and reliable.

The point that I was trying to make that while numerous canoe and kayak
vendors *have* used composite laminate construction, not all laminates are
the same. Corelite may actually be something similar to something that has
been around awhile but until I've seen a few boats layed up in Corelite that
are 5-6 years old without any degradation I'm not going to consider it a
proven technology.

Someone posted here awhile back considering a new kayak model that was
constructed with some sort of new composite material. Looking at the web
site it had a couple warnings about prolonged exposure to UV and the kayak
had a "stiffening" bar or something in the hull touted as if it were a
feature. To me, if something is added to stiffen the hull that tells me
that the material it's layed up with isn't sufficiently rigid.