Need help Identifying Old Canoe

All, I picked-up an Old Town Mad River Canoe from a friend and am trying to identify the year of the canoe. I have attached a pic of the canoe’s ID # but can’t find online or on the Mad Canoe River website (likely a user error on my part). Any suggestions on how to ID? !

The boat is made by Mad River Canoe. Old Town does not enter into it.

The hull was manufactured and certified with the US Coast Guard in November of 1984 for the 1985 model year.

I am assuming that it is a fiberglass hull. Mad River Canoe usually appended a “K” to the end of the HIN on their Kevlar boats in that time period.

Mad River Canoe has long been owned by Confluence WaterSports Co. If you wish to find out the model, the characters “44” after the manufacturer’s identification code (MAD) might indicate it but I can’t tell you. You could try calling customer service at Confluence but I suspect you will be wasting your time. If you want to know the model, take an accurate measurement of the beam at the widest point and the overall length, and post those measurements and some photos of the entire hull on this forum.

Thank you very much!

It looks like the K is in the HIN number just before the 485. The little bit of the hull interior that shows looks like Kevlar yellow.

The K character denotes the month of certification, in this case November. The MRC Kevlar boats typically had the characters “-K” appended to the end of the 12 character HIN. I do not know if this was true for every Kevlar hull that MRC made, however.

I dont think MR numbers in the middle 44802 indicate model number. Most likely MR numbered sequentially… So a photo and measurements are needed

At least some of the Mad River hulls used the first character or first two characters after the MIC to indicate model. Sometimes one or both was a letter, sometimes numbers. I am not sure that his was true for all of their hulls.

The character “E” or characters “EX” denoted an Explorer and “6” or a “66” a Malecite, for instance. This practice may have changed over the years.

If “44” is a model code, I don’t know which model it might represent.

Thanks everyone, see 3 pics at different angles.



I’ve taken a closer look at these pictures and wonder how I am going to get this canoe water worthy? Looks like a lot of work to.

Yes, you are looking at a big investment of time and sweat equity, and a fairly considerable investment in materials as well. Besides re-railing (replacing the gunwales), replacing seats, seat hangers, thwarts and deck plates, you would need to rebuild the broken stem of the canoe, using resin and fiberglass fabric.

Frankly, I doubt it is worth the time and money.

and flotation. If you invest in repairs, you don’t want it to sink

I believe this canoe has open top float tanks that many MRC canoes of that vintage had. The open top was covered by the deck plate so was not readily visible. I thing the reddish, brown material behind the demolished stem is flotational foam material, but it needs to be checked to make sure it is not rotten. Also, some of that stuff would shrink over time and not displace as much water. The good news is that the foam can be replaced if necessary with any decent closed cell foam, but it would need to be shaped to fill the float tank as much as possible and would entail some additional expense.

The good news is that the damaged hull came with new parts as my friend had intentions to fix so my investment is mostly sweat. I understand the may not be worth the investment comment for sure even with having parts and time on my hands, I’l have to enlist some help from my handy brothers. Thanks to all for the comments.