I recently purchased a used (pristine) Evergreen Prospector. This canoe has been barely used and only been used in reservoirs and flat water.
I will primarily be using this boat on rivers for fishing, recreation and navigating up to class III water. My question is would you recommend adding Kevlar skid plated for protection or wait until I see wear and actually need them?
Thanks in advance for your responses as I am a frequent lurker and seldom poster.
you did not lurk January 4th
cause your answer is under
canoe - tufweave or kevlar composite
Use the Search Archive function and enter keywords kevlar and skid plate if you cant find that topic by scrolling.
People get testy if asked the same question in the same week.
Depends
Advice I’ve seen is to wait until you need it.
OTOH - the local shop where I got my Prospector sets up their rental boats with skid plates right from the start. I bought one of those rentals (unused) because it was a great deal at the time and I expected some hard use. I’m not in the habit of running my stems up the beach or pin-balling blindly down rock gardens, but I have noticed that in my local river that has a lot of shallow riffles at low flows - if I misjudge the depth and/or current over submerged rocks, that skid plate often takes the brunt of it.
So, I guess it’s gonna depend a lot on where and when you will use it.
I’m old and senile, and don’t recall
whatever transpired before, so I’ll just say that a Prospector’ rocker and stem shape are such that wear will be slow. You can wait until the vinyl wears and exposes the ABS. May never happen, but then you can put on crappy Kevlar skid plates, or nice S-glass skid plates like I probably told you before.
yep that was you with the purty
skid plates on Jan 4th. Time flies when we get old.
Don’t remember that… but our
Bluewater came with light skid plates. All they do is make the lily pads stick to the bow.
re:
– Last Updated: Jan-12-10 8:28 PM EST –
I scrolled back several pages and missed the post.
I'm sorry you feel that I'm cluttering your board.
But thanks for the 411 on the previous post.
Paddle first
I got skid plates on my OT Tripper in 2000 and have not regretted it.
My Encore suffered wear on the ends. I put kevlar skid plate on one end and two or three layers of Dynel fabric on the other. Dynel is supposed to resist abrasion. The dynel end is much more conforming to the hull shape, smoother, etc. No wear through on either end so far.
Just paddling the boat as recommended by previous posters is a great idea. Whenever possible, spend time on the water first, time in the shop later. Possibly, you’ll never need to do it, and there isn’t much penalty for waiting. Water, on the other hand, is a terrible thing to waste!
~~Chip
You mean Dynel rather than Diolen?
“Dynel fabric has very high abrasion resistance but swells in the resin such that it works better if vacuum bagged or pressure molded. The most common uses of dynel are for wear patches on boats, edgings on paddles, and the like.” -Sweet Composites
It will be interesting to see how your skid plate does if it is impacted often. Dynel is not a “structural” fabric, but does wear very smooth, with little material loss.
Diolen is polyester. It is a tough fabric, and wears more smoothly than Nylon or Kevlar. Noah’s “CAP” or chemically activated polyester was basically the same as Diolen.
The two names are readily confused.