Over-Preaching to the Choir
It's gotten to the point -- 100 responses with this one -- that you're overpreaching to the choir, Brian.
Give it a rest. We KNOW what's wrong with NDK. We KNOW the QC isn't the best. Your dissing NDK constantly and with any chance you get hasn't put Nigel Dennis out of business.
And, btw, have you actually BEEN to Wales and his manufacturing facility?
For longer than I’ve read this board
there have been discussions of NDK quality control.
Years ago many wished Nigel Dennis would follow Nigel Foster and Derek Hutchinson’s lead and license his designs. Seaward manufactures three of Foster’s designs and Current Designs manufactures a couple of Hutchinson’s as well as the Foster Rumour. Both companies have a history of excellent quality control and customer service.
The only such arrangement of which I have heard involving Nigel Dennis was an aborted partnership with Dagger.
Pintail
As much as I love the Pintail – my husband has a 1992 one – it’s too big on me for the very same reasons.
I don’t know if you have access to a VCP dealer, but the AvocetLV might work for you as a day boat. Of course, the honeymoon is still on with my AvocetLV, which I got in February, but so far it has a lot of things I like.
so what?
She was providing an observation to the contrary of the previous post. No one said it was a competition, but the topic needs to be presented fairly.
Of course you should inspect a kayak before you buy it. But if you have custom ordered it it becomes more difficult.
Pintail
Try an ocean cockpit model instead. it will fit you better I think. the glass seat is a bit higher and you can do many different thing to set up contact points. Or as noted in the thread an Anas Acuta most likely an ocean cockpit as well.
OC
Yes, the ocean cockpit does make the fit better – it was standard in the very early models like my husband’s '92 and I actually prefer the OC – but I found the actual cockpit to be a bit too wide for me.
Padding does help but having a boat fit you well from the get-go and thus requiring less help from layers of minicell, comes closer to making paddling easier. Various manufacturers, as many postings indicate, have started to make boats for smaller people of both sexes which, in turn, has made fit better.
i read it more like she was defensive
And her comentary was apologetic…
One bit left out of Brian’s…
arguments against NDK is the fact that the chop strand mat is purposely chosen to localize failure points and speed easier repair. These “inferior” materials took enormous abuse and it was a surf ride down into a rocky reef that actually cracked my Explorer. In short, I took a hard hit. The repair was brain dead for my fiberglass repair gal who made it like new. When using primarily whole cloth, failure can be spread over larger areas and sometimes require more work to repair.
One other thing: these “lesser” materials enable reinforcing over critical areas that are using sheet cloth, but get reinforced with chop strand. Specifically, the decks where a constant wear from trainings at BCU clinics and assessments, or club meetups where folks are routinely dragging hulls over their decks in real or mock rescues. It isn’t lost on me that these boats and also including Valley and P&H have evolved almost symbiotically. Tough, easy to repair, coupled with a good design are good characteristics to have and why so many instructors and curriculum-type paddlers seek them out.
I’m not going to argue that alot of mistakes and badly produced boats haven’t been marketed, however, most are quite acceptable. Ours are well made and perform well within the design mandate. The finish is quite good. Is it the lightest in it’s class? No. Does it offer the least drag figures as published by Sea Kayaker Magazine? Hell no. Does it offer a very good boat for poking into small places and handle some crazy stuff thrown at it with aplomb? Absolutely.
If you like the Romany, Explorer or other NDK designs they are great boats and well thought out. I was less cautious about my Toyota than I was about my NDK when I bought it, however, these days I think Nigel might have something.
Dogmaticus
To kobzol
I am not defensive here. I could be if I was Nigel Dennis, or a rep of the company, or it mattered to my well-being if you or anyone else here bought an NDK kayak. None of that is so. My NDK kayak is not offended by anyone's opinion of it, it's a boat. It floats, turns and goes straight on command and that's pretty much what a boat is supposed to do.
It is exactly as I said though - the NDK QC thing gets beat to death when it comes up on this board. Perhaps you haven't been around long enough to see this go by numerous times.
Your apologetic thing is really reaching. Someone suggested that it was odd that no one had spoken up with positives about these boats, I pointed out the obvious that there is plenty of that in this thread. It was on point for that post.
You are looking for emotion where none exists, except for an admitted frustration with this thing not wanting to die. You may want to be a little harder on yourself in terms of societal assumptions...
nah
I don’t want to …
Celia, my last response was to Slushpaddler. I explained how I felt about your post. That’s just the way I felt. I don’t need to adjust anything. It’s not my job here. It is a discussion board and nothing more to me.
you have a fiberglass repair gal?
How do I get one of those?
You hire her, that’s how. Mine is
better at fiberglass and gelcoat than I am.
Dogmaticus
No, but I’ve spoken to people who have
It’s irrelevant anyway, as the output from the factory speaks for itself. The quality problems and inconsistency are clearly evident, as are the materials used, so it really doesn’t much matter what the factory is like. There are obvious problems with their quality control practices or they wouldn’t have the problems they do.
When I was in the QA/QC biz, I saw a few products whose quality was hampered by the facilities they were built in, but you can build a high-quality kayak almost anywhere if you use the right materials and techniques. It’s a matter of philosophy as much as anything else. Either you’re dedicated to producing a quality product or you aren’t.
I’m not surprised it felt big…
…and I agree with what the other posters have said. The Pintail is a 22" wide boat with a reasonably high foredeck (12") and it’s optimally sized for paddlers in the 150-190 pound range, based on what I’ve seen and experienced. I own a Pintail and an Anas Acuta, as do my girlfriend and her housemate. However, all of our boats have ocean cockpits and we paddle Greenland style, so the foredecks are padded down for a closer, more traditional fit.
The Pintail would not be my first recommendation as a touring boat for other reasons, mainly that it doesn’t track worth a damn and it’s pretty slow, so you end up working harder than necessary. The Anas Acuta would make a better touring boat for a small paddler, as the tracking is somewhat better, it’s somewhat faster and it’s an inch and a half narrower.
IMO, ocean cockpits are really the way to go, particularly for smaller paddlers, as they provide many more fitting options and leg positions than standard-sized keyhole cockpits, which are huge on smaller folks. One of the nice things about the Rumour is the “tweener” sized cockpit. While it’s not great for an average sized person (it’s neither keyhole nor ocean), it’s near perfect for small paddlers, lacking only in the thigh bracing, which can be easily modified. If you look in my “Kayak Outfitting” album a the link below, there are pics of the mods I’ve made to our various boats, including the Rumour.
It’s not quite that simple
Sure, the damage is more localized on boats built with mat, but there are two important point to consider:
1- The brittle nature of mat construction means that damage that does occur will be more severe. Specifically, you end up with cracks, holes or in really severe cases broken boats, failures that compromise the integrity of the hull and potentially endanger the paddler. In a more resilient boat, damage is spread over a larger area, but this is precisely why it is much less likely to compromise the integrity of the hull or result in serious leaks. In other words, the failure mode is more forgiving. Frankly, when I'm on the water and something bad happens, I'm far more concerned with whether the boat will get me home than with how big the repaired area will be.
2- Stronger, more resilient construction using cloth makes a boat more resistant to damage, so there will often be no damage in circumstances that would break a mat layup. Go to the Tidewater Kayaks site and check out the videos of Patrick wailing on one of his hulls with a hammer. Although it's an extreme example, it makes my point that strong and resilient is the way to go. Had that been an NDK hull, I'd be surprise if it survived more than one blow before holing. No damage is always better than a damaged boat, regardless of how easy it is to repair.
In my own experience repairing boats, I haven't found cloth layups to be any more difficult to repair than mat layups. Moreover, in areas with complex curves, such as keels and chines - having the damaged area retain it's basic shape - which is typical with cloth layups - makes repairs easier than dealing with ragged, cracked mat. It allows me to reinforce the area from the inside before removing the damaged material, which makes it a simpler matter to maintain the original shape.
Regarding use of mat in deck reinforcements, it's done for one simple reason; mat is stiff and it reduces flexing in high-stress areas. Note also that the boats you cite are built with cloth and that mat is used in addition to the cloth and only for reinforcement, which is an appropriate application for it.
There are other applications where mat is appropriate, specifically in compass recesses and deck fittings, where it's ability to mold to complex curves is advantageous. It's sometimes used in bulkheads to increase stiffness, which is fine. When fabricating bulkheads from scratch, I sometimes sandwich a layer of mat between layers of cloth for exactly that purpose.
When used appropriately, glass mat can be useful stuff, but that doesn't mean that you should build an entire kayak with it. As far as I know, NDK is the only company still doing that, which should tell you something.
Do you really think that the rest of the industry has moved to more expensive materials and more complex manufacturing methods just for the heck of it?
First off, when you go to Nigel’s shop,
something I’ve done, you watch them lay a single layer of cloth down in the hull. The chop is the reinforcement not the primary. I didn’t watch them build a deck, so no info for you there. Second, these kayaks are used all over the world in some pretty rough places, by people that beat the crap out of their equipment. Are there some dogs along the way? Sure. Mostly not. You get a great design that is simple to fix. Have you ever read Jed Luby’s report off the Maine coast on a BCU 5* training? You recall what happened to that Explorer on that rock and how they fixed it and got home? There’s alot of boats we talk about on this forum that wouldn’t have gotten home that day. That one took extraordinary damage and made it back. That’s part of a design mandate, Brian. It may not work for you, that’s fine! You raise some valid points. However, look at the list of paddlers Nigel has his paws into and there aren’t many chumps. Are these people all wrong in their choice of kayaks and other equipment? Leaving the issue of sponsorship out of the equation, (something that does not influence me), I see a bunch of talented people that sought out NDK and that equipment often.
Dogmaticus
Thanks for that info
First-hand observations are good. My dealer sent me photos from when she visited the NDK facility but there are no photos of the actual building process, just shots of the finished boats. (There were some really cool custom graphics, BTW.)
plus, she’s a gal
How bout we all go paddle now
happened to that Explorer on that rock
Tom had that boat in his shop for a long time. Eventually had it repaired and for sale at a greatly reduced price noting it was that “legendary” kayak.
Anyone who has seriously played on the rocks of Maine has probably at least seen a badly holed boat field repaired to be paddle home. Such repair at sea was part of my old BCU 4* training. I assume it still is part of such training.