If you are a dreamer, a doer, a horizon viewer - come in! come in! Announce yourself and let it be known.
The seed of adventure has been sown.

The goal is to take this boat on a trip that no other Wharram boat has taken.
From Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories up the MacKenzie River to the Beafort Sea
and westward to the Bering Sea and south to the inside passage on the Alaska and British Columbia coast.

Sunday, August 09, 2009






The paddle I built this week worked fine ....until I destructively tested it back to "broken iako!" I had nicked the carbon fiber fabric on the blade with a chisel when I was cleaning up excess resin. I filled the nick on the final coat but that is where it failed. I was paddling as hard as I could and snap the blade folded - starting from the cut fibers . Not to worry, I've removed the broken bits from the shaft and have a new and improved blade started. Beta 1 was pretty light, about 4-5 oz lighter than production CF blades of this size so on Beta 2 I've decided to add a 2 mm sheet of plywood to back up the CF as the balsa certainly doesn't provide any strength. The plywood adds about 3 oz. The other thing I'm working on is vacuum bagging. For paddle making my neglected food vacuum bagging unit may just be the ticket. I did a test run on Friday when a made a closed cell foam and CF "hockey puck" the vacuum bagging part worked great though with only one layer of CF the whole thing remains spongy.

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