Lightness, lightness, lightness !!
yes they fuzz, as soon as I scrape a rock or whatever and yes I don’t care.
They are light, fast and a delight to paddle.
A little touch up with some resin here and there and they will keep a paddler happy for years and years.
cheers,
JackL
You could still have the lightness with
an outside S-glass layer. Look at the weights of Millbrook’s open boats.
Salty
Wow, how do you know this stuff? Amazing. 
Not sure how much of that I’ll retain, but I will definitely heed the advice in your last two lines - that much I understood and will remember.
Thanks for taking the time to answer all my questions about this. There is really a wealth of knowledge on this board, for which I’m very grateful.
Yeah a narrower Q10 made sense…
– Last Updated: Jun-07-08 12:52 AM EST –
... but then I look at that like Nanci - as a paddler. As a marketing thing, I guess we have to defer to them to decide.
Still, I wonder how many they've actually sold of that model at 21"? How much of that form good word of mouth that's been mostly from you two? Doubt it would have been much less if they'd done it narrower, and maybe more as a properly scaled hull for a small paddler is rare, and so easy to get buzz going...
Q900 seems pretty damn unlikely. They only do Winter's designs (though given the 3 different 700's and the Q10 they seem to have little issue changing them) and as far as I can tell he's pretty much fully retired now.
Tell you what, when I win LOTTO I'll finish up a design and see if they'll build it OEM for me under my own brand (and if not, someone will)...
ok,gross generalization
just personal opinion that in the range of non-racing big boats that going for a marginally lighter boat isn’t worth the money, for me. Regarding “soft spots” that’s a gross generalization from one well used boat and a couple new boats with dings from shipping. Not a statistically relevant sample. I figured getting the QCC400 without the rudder was a cheap way to get a light boat.
Money
How much money do you want to spend?
Buy the one that equals that amount. Paddle.
bingo
like so much else it depends on your bank account
You talk about “kevlar fuzzies” !
You should see the bottom of our kevlar Jensen 17 today.
It looks like someone took a dull razor to it and tried to expose and make as much fuzzy as they could.
We made two five mile runs down the New river yesterday in in rocky water that in some places was only a few inchs deep and the rocks are about as sharp as you can get.
On the second run we made a make shift front grundge pad out of duct tape, and that ended up with the center gone and just two side strips left.
The boat is now in my work shop eagerly awaiting my tender loving care with epoxy!
Oh yea, I almost forgot, we zigged when we should have zagged, got sideways and trapped between some rocks, flipped and naturally it had to be probably the only deep water in the river. It took four tries to flip the boat to get the water out, before we decided to swim it to shore and flip it. (the story goes on, but I’ll end it here).
cheers,
JackL