Free Canoe Information from Red Rock
Welcome to Red Rock's free How-To page. The saying goes that "there is more than one way to skin a cat". Here is how I skin cats. It took several years to put this all down in this website. My techniques are 100% OJT and they appear to work quite well. There are other ways to do it and there will always be some "expert" who'll say otherwise. Bearing that in mind, I've spent many years doing these repairs and I really don't care what the internet experts have to say -especially about epoxy. To them, I say "boolsheet!"
What You Need To Know: The principles used in all the different topics listed are almost always the same and the techniques are very similar. Have a hole in your kevlar canoe? Sand it and then use some fiberglass and a piece of kevlar along with epoxy resin and patch it. Need to refinish your canoe? Varnish it, OR, If it's had a ton of use and is oxidizing, coat with with marine epoxy resin. Just about all of that is covered in some way, shape or form. So, contacting me for even more details on how to fix a used canoe is going to cost you a consult fee of $75 for the first 15 minutes and $25 for each half hour thereafter. It takes a lot of my time to rewrite an email with the exact same topic only in a slightly different way. And no, I have no recommendations for aluminum canoes or plastic canoes. Plastic canoes need skid plate kits made for them specifically (royalex or polyethylene). Plastic canoes are tubs and kinda crappy at everything they do except being "gravity slaves" and crunching rocks down a set of rapids. Other than being cheaper than kevlar, more expensive than aluminum, heavier than aluminum and not as tough, plactic canoes don't serve anyone well in the Boundary Waters. Whitewater, maybe, but you shouldn't be shooting rapids in the Boundary Waters if you have half a brain. That's why portages exist. And, no - the government did not put the portages in place for your wilderness safety. The Indians did. The same portages been here for 10,000 years.
So, to repeat: Sand, apply resin, stick the patch on the hole, wet out the patch with resin, cover in plastic, squeeze out the air bubbles over the patch, let cure for overnight, peel off plastic, paddle. Every repair is the same for the most part. And, as per usual, foam core, kevlar canoes suck. Bell Canoes is no longer producing canoes and at this writing, supposedly looking for a buyer and have been doing so for well over a year now.
Get a Souris River Quetico 17 and your canoeing wishes will be more than adequately fulfilled for 99% of all recreational paddling enthusiasts for all flatwater applications. That's the only canoe the vast majority of paddlers will ever need.
NOTE: This information is all copyrighted. You can't reproduce it unless you contact us first and get permission. I'm getting a little tired of so-called "expert" canoe/outdoor sites helping themselves to my work and passing it off as their own. Lets see if you sandal-wearers can actually produce your own original information for once. That's doubtful. You'll more than likely need the government to do that for you using tax dollars collected from someone else. (OK - there may be a bit of a "tone" here, but I'm sticking to it. I'm tired of self-centered, lazy, non-conrtibuting zero's.)
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