Erik Sprenne wrote: > > Michael Daly wrote: > > > And how tightly one ties/straps the boat to the racks/saddles/etc. for a > given vehicle. Plastic boats can generally be tied tighter than fiberglass > boats (unless you own a British 'heavy' <g>), as plastic will deform and > recover its shape without permanent marks, while fiberglass boats will flex > only to a certain degree, after which they will suffer irreversible damage. > This may be as good a place as any to talk about strapping down folding kayaks on a roofrack. The rule I use is crank them down real hard so much so that your strap or rope is indenting the sponsons by quite a bit. I have done this regularly for a dozen years with a variety of foldables with no damage whatsoever. The secret though is what you are cranking them down on. I used cradles at one time but I am not certain they really are all that important with a foldable. The odds that the cradles will line up with crossribs are rare and all the cradle will be is against fabric and some long pieces. A better solution is to use commercially available windsurfer pads around the roof rack bars or use pipe insulation tubes. This gives you something soft and cushioning to crank down the foldable against. (BTW, try not to draw straps across the deck fabric any more than necessary as that can wear at deck coatings, i.e. throw the straps over the top and pull them over loosely until you have buckled the loose end; then you can cinch down real hard to that sponson-indentation extreme.) I bring this all up because I have at times seen people who say their foldable doesn't cartop well. I look at how they strap down and they act as if they were strapping down an ostrich egg, i.e. gingerly. Not necessary at all. But the cushioning is important. Years ago I had Doug Simpson, co-founder of Feathercraft, here for a meeting and later we went paddling to the Statue of Liberty using 2 of his K-Lights and the Klepper Aerius I that I owned at the time. We made the boats in my hallway because it was wintertime in NYC and we didn't want to freeze while doing this. When it came time to put them on my minivan's roofrack, we discovered that some one had stolen the rear Thule rack. Since I had factory racks below them, we just did the best we could. We cartopped to the launch site and later back to knock down the boats on the street near his hotel on Broadway. As I pulled the rear frame half of the Klepper out of the skin, the chine rod came apart in my hand; it was broken. Here I was with a break in a wooden frame with, of all people, the major proponent of aluminum framed boats. Doug looked over and in his driest Western Canadian voice said "Ralph, does that happen often?" What had happened was that the rear factory rack was not padded and in cinching down the boats too much pressure was put on that chine rod. I also like to think that it was also my self sacrifice of putting my Klepper on the bottom to protect one of Doug's K-Lights since the three boats could not all fit side by side on my rack. :-) ralph diaz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Diaz . . . Folding Kayaker newsletter PO Box 0754, New York, NY 10024 Tel: 212-724-5069; E-mail: rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com "Where's your sea kayak?"----"It's in the bag." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced/forwarded outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Tue Aug 08 2000 - 06:19:32 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:29 PDT