just bought a canoe needs a repair

Hi I just bought a 10year old dagger legend. The inside vinyl has a crack near the centre line under the front airbag area. The boat is soundon the outside. Also Iis water tight. I am after sugestions for whats best to repair this inner skin with. Can I just buy stick on vinyl or would it be best with fibre glass or similar?



Thanks

Andy

See if you can use a needle or awl to
explore the depths of the crack, without expanding it. If the crack is only through the vinyl surface layer, you might not have to do anything about it. If the inner ABS layer below the vinyl is cracked, it needs to be patched.



It is possible to remove the structurally-useless vinyl layer by using a sharp chisel at a very low angle. I would be inclined to do that in order to patch directly on the ABS. Skimming off the vinyl goes fairly easily because the vinyl-to-ABS bond isn’t that strong, and because the ABS is much harder than the vinyl.



You could use fiberglass or Kevlar for patching. A couple of concentric layers would do it, using a quality epoxy to wet out the cloth. Don’t use any more resin than it takes to wet out the cloth.



It’s a bit puzzling why a crack should have developed at the margin of a float bag.

just bought a canoe needs a repair
We have tried with a strip of carbon fiber but down to flex and possible not enough keying to rhe surface it has come away. The crack is only in the vinyl at the moment. I cant post pictures.

what I’d try
would be the two-part epoxy putty for plastic that you can find at Home Depot etc. I have use the stuff on the bottom (outside) of my royalex boats, and it sticks very well - I even used it on the stems as a makeshift skid plate, and it stuck well there, and I did next to no surface prep. Only downside, the stuff I used was white, but who cares if the bottom of my boat looks like it was sitting under a roost tree. Be sure to get the variety that is for plastic repair (may also be called plumbers epoxy)



I’d try to work some into the crack, then a flat patch atop the crack. Its fairly cheap - $5 a stick or so, and very easy to work with and if it fails, no big deal - but I think it would work, especially if you roughened the surface and cleaned it well.

What Matt says, but…
I would use West Systems G-Flex epoxy



Jack L