Getting started on the Dynel skid plates for my Old Town Tripper. Started with eyeballing the area I want the skid plates to cover and making the edges/corners out with a sharpie on the hull. Decided to mirror the front and rear plates. They’re going to be 54" long, starting at 7" wide and tapering down to 3" wide.
Taped a bunch of newspaper together, folded it in
half twice so I could cut out out two templates at once that would be as close to perfectly mirrored as I could hope to achieve. With the newspaper templates cut out I checked them on the canoe (pictured), and once satisfied they would cover the area I wanted I pinned them to the Dynel fabric and cut it.
I cut them on the bias so it took a bit of finagling to get the templates laid out to waste as little fabric as possible (I want to use some to add skid plates to my solo canoe too after practicing on the beater boat here).
Next step will be to fill the little spots, where the outer abs layer of the Royalex is chipped away to expose the foam core, with thickened G-flex epoxy and let it cure before applying the skid plate.
A lot of the ABS (yellowish in color), particularly around the spots where the foam core is exposed, is weekend from UV exposure. So I went in with my pocket knife and chipped it back until I found where it was still solid/pliable.
Now for the fix. West Coast Systems G-Flex epoxy. So I taped off the surrounding area, and mixed a batch (with a bit of colloidal silica added to thicken it).
Later in the week I’ll sand down the high spots and add some more epoxy to any low areas. Then get the rest of the stuff ready to apply the fiberglass skid plates.
Forgot to grab any pictures, but I went over the stern (the end needing a greater amount of work) with some 60grit sand paper, mixed another, thicker batch, and then filled in the low spots and leveled it all off.
If the weather is decent this weekend, and I don’t get side tracked by a million other things as per usual, I’ll lay down the dynel skid plates.
Mixed up a batch of epoxy and applied the dynel skid plates to my canoe. I darkened the epoxy with some tint and graphite. A thin layer of epoxy goes on the hull first, and then the dynel which gets wetted out with more epoxy. A flexible plastic scraper makes spreading the epoxy and smoothing out the fabric fairly easy.
Let it sit for a bit. Catch any runs and address any dry spots or bubbles that develop.
After 30 min or so the epoxy should be dry enjoy it’s not running any more and then the top layer of masking tape and paper can be removed.
Peel ply applied. Hold it tight with tape and use a roller or the plastic scraper to smooth and work any excess epoxy.
Other than being initially unstable while only laden with two people (the gunnel height seats don’t help with this and are soon to be lowered when this project is finished) it paddles nicely. Is it fast? Does it cruise effortlessly? Not really. It doesn’t really accelerate, so much as it advances like a battle cruiser on the horizon. I’m looking forward to loading it down and doing a 3-5 day river trip with it.
And after almost, 24hrs peel ply gets peeled. I’ll be honest, I was half worried this stuff wasn’t going to peel up, or it’d pull up the dynel with it. Peeling off the masking tape holding down the peel ply wound up being more effort. It left a nice matte textured finish, with only a couple divots/low spots and ridges from folds in the peel ply. Trimmed the fold ridges down with my pocket knife, and gave it a wash with soap and water. I’ll give it a top coat of graphite thickened epoxy sometime this week before I leave it to cure for a while. Then I can paint over it and peel off the the last layer of masking tape.
More canoe work! Slapped a final layer of epoxy over the dynel skid skid plate to fill in the texture left by the peel ply. Cheap harbor freight Bondo spreaders worked great for getting it smooth. I thickened the G-Flex epoxy a fair bit with graphite, so these skid plates should hopefully hold up to light abuse at the hands of friends and family. In a week or so I’ll go back and paint over them.
Skid plate install is now officially completed. Finally got around to slapping some paint on it for added UV protection and to tidy up the appearance. Hit it with some 150 grit, washed it off then let it dry while I mixed some gloss black enamel with a little graphite and some shiny pewter epoxy tint mixed in (same as what I added to the epoxy. One solid coat then a touch up pass before peeling the tape. Is it a perfect example of a dynel and G-Flex skid plate, no. But I’m not dissatisfied with the results for my first time out.
Some Trippers have had rough treatment and dragged around a lot. They are candidates for skid plates. For a newer boat in good condition I would hesitate because they clunky and don’t make your canoe move through the water better.
I have used fiberglass tape in a couple of layers and epoxy on lots of fiberglass and kevlar boats. I would be tempted to the same thing on a Tripper.
This boat didn’t look like it’s seen much hard use, but previous owners weren’t very caring when pulling it out of the water or when moving it. I had long patches where the vinyl was missing, the ABS damaged/chipped out, and foam core exposed. So a skid plate was warranted in this case. Even if it hadn’t been, it was still a good candidate to practice on before I put skid plates on my Dagger Sojourn solo.
I haven’t measured the height of the skid plate with my calipers, but I can tell you I have T-shirts thicker than the single layer Dynel and G-Flex epoxy I used on this boat. I and didn’t even do as good a job compressing it with peel ply as probably could’ve been done (a long strip curving around a recurve bow is hard to apply pressure evenly across). I doubt a person would be able to feel an effect from these.
