Anybody have an unmodified Outrage that they can measure the thwarts for me? This one I’m fiddling with has badly weathered wood and since I can’t know the history of this boat, I want to make sure my replacement is correct.
Wow. I didn’t think the Outrage was that rare. Nobody?
Steve, I have an Outrage that I believe is stock, but it is in a storage locker across town. I will try to get over there tomorrow and measure the width of the molded hull at the thwart locations and the length of the thwarts.
My Outrage has wood gunwales. I am told that the synthetic gunwales that Kay Henry at MRC originally put on that boat were not properly preshaped for the boat, and that reduced its end flare (an act which made smoke come out of designer Tom Foster’s ears when he related the story to me).
OK Steve, here is what I got. The distance measurements from stem to thwart, etc, are all from the molded tip of the hull to the center of the thwart, measured along the longitudinal midline of the canoe. The beam measurements are all taken at the outside edge of the molded hull, not including the width of the outwale, at the center of the thwart. The thwart lengths were a bit tricky to measure due to outfitting and could be off by up to 1/4" or so.
First off, my boat has three main thwarts. I believe I added a third thwart near center to back up a minicell pedestal, but it has been a few years since I re-outfitted that boat and my memory is a bit foggy. I believe the other two thwarts are stock and in original position. I don’t see any extra or filled holes in the wooden gunwales to suggest otherwise, and I believe the gunwales are stock.
The two thwarts that I believe are stock are nearly equidistant from the ends of the boat. The front thwart is 52 1/2" from the tip of the bow stem and the rear thwart is 52 3/8" from the tip of the stern stem. The molded beam at the front thwart location is 24 1/8" and the molded beam at the rear thwart location is 24 1/4".
The width of the front thwart is 23 1/4" and the width of the rear thwart is 23 3/4". The hull tucks in a bit at the sheer at the rear thwart location. That is why the width of the rear thwart is so close to the molded beam at that location.
For what it is worth, the distance between the two thwarts is 40 1/4". My “middle” thwart is located 62 1/2" from the rear stem and 10 1/4" forward of the rear thwart. The beam of the molded hull is 25" at that location. The middle thwart is 24 1/2" wide.
In addition there are two short carry handle thwarts near the stems. The forward one is just under 1 foot from the front stem and the rear just over 1 foot from the rear stem. I did not measure the widths of those.
Cool. I hope to paddle an outrage one day. Seems like one of the most loved soft chine designs. I wonder if it will ever be molded again…
Thank you Pete! That will help a lot.
RE: the vinyl gun’l…Mine were further jacked by a previous owner apparently over tightening the bag cage and leaving it in the hot sun. I have been able to correct that some, but I wonder if pulling them off and replacing with wood gun’ls would be a better plan.
Kona - I am absolutely new to whitewater solos. I haven’t had a lot of time in the boat yet, and all I have to compare it with are longer canoes with much less (if any) rocker. But it does seem very forgiving for such a narrow paddling station. Forgiving, that is, for everything except a less than perfect forward stroke. 
Think “turn”, and away you go!
Tom Foster claimed that the synthetic gunwales that Kay Henry put on “his” boat, which were intended for a different canoe altogether, killed the flare in the ends. I really don’t know. I have put my wood gunwaled Outrage up next to ones with synthetic gunwales and must say I did not see any striking difference. It may be that the synthetic gunwales that MRC put on the Outrage changed over the years. If so, I have no idea when.
Compared to other Royalex solo canoes of the same vintage and length, the Outrage has a significantly narrower beam than nearly all the rest of the river runners. I found this out when I paddled Tom Foster’s prototype Kevlar Outrage which he called “Fluidity” (try saying that three times quickly). I had been paddling an Encore and fell out of Tom’s canoe within about 3 minutes.
The Outrage is a very cool solo Royalex whitewater canoe. Although my taste gravitated towards hulls with a sharp chine, I feel that the Outrage is one of the very best soft-chined designs out there. Fool around with it and get the hull “carving”. Tom was a master of hull carving. If this is not familiar to you, get the hull going with some momentum by whatever means you want, then heel it a bit to your onside, keep your weight forward, your stroke relatively short, your paddle cadence reasonably brisk and the off-side bow will tend to get pinned by the bow wave and will resist the tendency of your stroke to turn the canoe off-side. Basically the same thing that Andrew Westwood later termed the “2 X 4 technique”.
http://www.rapidmedia.com/rapid/categories/skills/5857-open-cane-technique-power-steering
I remember many moons ago when Paddler magazine was actually worth reading and had some decent technique articles, Tom Foster had an article on “Paddling the Inside Circle - The Fastest Way between Two Points is a Circle”. That was long, long before Andrew Westwood and I thought it was pretty cool because it was something I had sort of discovered by accident on my own.
“keep your weight forward, your stroke relatively short, your paddle cadence reasonably brisk”
Yeah - I figured out that was going to be the way to go forward on my second time out in the boat. It’s a different world from my Dagger Sojourn. Knowing is one thing - doing it gracefully…something else.