Has anyone tried this? I want to add adjustable pegs in a Royalex Wenonah Vagabond. I prefer not to drill holes in the hull. I found some suggestions on line but no one mentioned they actually tried it and what results they had.
Thanks and Happy New year.
I’ve never actually tried gluing to Royalex either, so sorry, i know that was your question but another way to go;
use a board or closet pole as a foot brace. get a poece of wood and attach a line to each end, tie the lines to either side of your seat. Quick, adjustable, no commitment required.
For canoes they make adjustable footbars that can be installed in lieu of kayak pegs which would require you to sit splayed leg.
I currently use a cut off paddle shaft clipped to paracord loops tied to a thwart. Works fine, but I wanted something more permanent. I’ve looked at the Wenonah style telescoping bars, they look flimsy.
If you are concerned about the strength of the Wenonah bars you you are probably going to need to both screw and glue your foot pegs in. Even racing you shouldn’t be loading the foot braces that heavily. Roylex can be a bit tricky to get a good bond (and R-Lite is worse). You can check here: http://www.mikeyeeoutfitting.com/index.html for adhesive recommendations.
I suggest that you drill holes and be happy in the knowledge that the connection will never fail (you will never be sure about strength or service life of the connection if you use adhesive). When I first started solo canoeing, I was a “sitter” (before I learned to prefer kneeling), and realized right away that I needed a foot brace of some kind. My foot brace was an old style from Wenonah. I remember that it could be adjusted forward and back on tracks, and each track was fastened to the hull with two bolts. The kit came with pop-rivets, and that’s what most people use, but pop-rivets have absolutely no advantage over bolts unless there’s no access to both sides, and in fact, they aren’t as good. The superior clamping power of even very tiny bolts creates a situation where friction between the foot-brace mounting track and the hull is the only thing that comes into play when you apply force that might potentially make it slip (without sufficient clamping force, it’s only the ability of the hull to resist tearing at the drilled holes that keeps the track in place, and that’s a less-desireable situation. By the way, this same principle is what keeps the wheels on your car from slipping on the hubs during hard acceleration or braking, and that’s why failing to make the lug nuts tight enough leads to broken studs. The lateral strength of the wheel studs never even comes into play as long as the wheel nuts are tight enough that friction alone keeps the wheel from slipping).
Okay, so that’s a detail-oriented description of why foot-brace mounts that are bolted to the hull will be as strong or stronger than any other method you can use. It’s certainly a lot simpler.
For what it’s worth, with low-profile, rounded bolt heads, and the bolts tightened just enough so that the washers sink in flush with the outside surface of the hull, there’s really not much potential for the bolt head to catch on anything.
One more thing. If you ARE going to glue-in your adjusting tracks, you would be far better off using a cross bar instead of foot pegs. With foot pegs, any downward pressure you put on the peg will put a torque on the track in its least-efficient direction, creating far more stress to the connection than what’s necessary. That same downward force applied to a cross bar which connects the tracks on opposite sides of the hull results only in shear, not torque, and shear is the most efficient way for the glued connection to be stressed.
I am also a straight shaft kneeler, but at 63 it’s my ankles/feet that give out first. I then switch to sitting with a bent shaft. I’m convinced, bolting is the way to go.
Thanks all for the input.
If for some reason you later decide to remove or re-position the foot brace tracks and do not want to leave the holes plugged with machine screws and nuts, you can very easily fill in the holes in the hull with West System’s G Flex epoxy thickened with some silica gel, then paint the cured epoxy with some auto touch up paint that matches the color of your hull.
Plexus or G Flex could be used to bond the tracks to a Royalex canoe but the attachment would be relatively permanent and removal would leave much more obvious damage.