I have a Sawyer Summersong with a sliding tractor seat. It has the metal hangers suspended from gunwales to the floor that allow the seat slider bars to be adjusted to one of three different heights.
The seat itself is molded from a clear, hard plastic (polycarbonate?) and has acquired some cracks which are bound to worsen. The seat is reasonably comfortable and I would like to repair it if possible.
Any suggestions? My thought was to enlarge the cracks enough to get some G-Flex epoxy into them, and put one or more thin layers of fiberglass cloth on the seat bottom as reinforcement.
If necessary, I can probably adapt a Wenonah tractor seat, but the crossbar spacing is not the same as in the Wenonahs I have seen and it would require some fiddling.
Thanks
Thanks for the advice, guys.
I did indeed speak to Scott Smith at Superior Canoes. The original Sawyer seat was molded out of Lexan plastic. He doesn’t have the mold but molds a similarly shaped seat out of fiberglass or Kevlar for his boats, which he could mount on my frame.
Indeed, the photos at Clipper Canoe of the sliding seat system in their Solitude and Freedom looks the same as the Sawyer system with regards to the frame, although the bucket seat is clearly not molded out of Lexan. They don’t seem to be answering the phone in Abbotsford today, but I will check with them.
Thanks for the Devcon plastic welder tip. I had thought of Devcon and I suspect it would work better. It might provide a temporary fix. I rather suspect the Lexan has become brittle with age. Scott says he is getting a lot of requests to replace Summersong and Shockwave seats these days.
Seat molds
I wish I had those seat molds. No one seems to know where they are. I would rather have the kevlar or fiberglass seats anyway.
George
Clipper Canoe
Well I did call Clipper in Abbotsford BC this AM and the plastic bucket seat they use in their Solitude, Freedom, and some other models will fit the Sawyer frame.
I am going to pick one up and see if it is an exact match. The Sawyer seats were molded Lexan. The Clipper seats are some other plastic which doesn’t become brittle.
I don’t know if Clipper has the mold, but I might be able to find out from Marlin later this month.