I've always been told that Kevlar boats are more prone to this. When I got my Kevlar Arctic Hawk I thought the rear deck oilcanned to an alarming degree. It just didn't look right to me. Based on a complete ignorance of the subject as it relates to this boat, I made a gunwale to gunwale structural foam unit out of 2" ethafoam, that runs from the rear bulkhead to almost the lip of the rear hatch. It locks together once in position and is fairly removable if the need arises. I also reinforced the bulkheads with 2" ethafoam on each side, and a cental pillar running down the cockpit. That was full length until I found out that even my avg. size 9 feet could move even a half each once I was in the boat. Now there's 16 " of open space around the foot braces again. Did it help? Sure doesn't oil can anymore, and I feel a lot better about it, but it's now a wee bit short on storage. Kevin Jan Mason writes: I have a kevlar Wind Dancer. The rack bars on my Westfalia are on either side of the cockpit. No cracks to date. I have a Saris rack and saddles. On the Wind Dancer, the bars under the bulkhead really does not apply because it has foam bulkheads. The foam bulkheads do a good job of keeping the water out but they do not do very much in terms of keeping the hull ridged. My yak has developed two 5" gel coat cracks centered on either side of the leading edge of the rear hatch. I got those from doing paddle float rescues. The foam rear bulkhead let the rear deck pancake in a little to far. So far I have removed the rear foam bulkhead and getting ready to replace it with a 6mm plywood one. (snipped) *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Jul 19 2002 - 13:30:20 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:55 PDT