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RodeoClown post this in "THAT other thread" so I want to know ... welll?????

So here's a relavent question for discussion- How much has the shape of the "traditional" canoe (if there is such a thing) been shaped by performance vs the limitations of the materials from which the boats are/were made? It would be tough to build a Spanishfly from birchbark, aluminum, or royalex, but rotomolding allows for more elaborate shapes.

...Discuss...

Then I see TheKrikkitWars posting about a winter project....

PE right now seems like the only way to go for the rock bash'n style of late ... but is there something better out there?

Are we max'ed design wise due to:
1. Materials / Technology
3. Ideas
4. Guts to be non-traditional

simply put... no

I'm working on a few things at the moment I obviously won't talk about... but no... the biggest problem frankly is having an actual marketplace to sell the ideas and finished products to is a very limited sector... in the 'big picture'.

Think about it this way... how many "rec" kayaks do you think were sold in the past twelve months compared to ww-canoes? It's really hard for companies to justify spending large amounts of capital if the return ($) isn't there on their investment... and if they don't have capital from sales then there is nothing to invest.

These days every new boat is a bit of a gamble when you factor in the overall global economy, the number of overall units sold which are already in the marketplace (used boats) in the prior five years and the overall cost to design, manufacture and distribute it and that gives one pause before making any investment.

It's a different game for ww-kayak companies simply because they have a much-much-much larger pool of potential customers to draw from which potentially offsets the costs based on the number of units sold much more easily.

As I've stated previously on this web-site... if the boat buying public doesn't actually go out and buy *new* boats (canoes in our case) then you shouldn't plan on seeing very many *new designs* or *new materials* very often coming from the larger manufacturers.

It's all relative my friends...

Does anyone know how many ww-kayaks Jackson, LL, Dagger, etc., etc., etc. sold this year? I bet it's a lot.

and creeker said it well...something about..."$1500? thats double what i,ve ever paid for a yak" or something like that. and 1500 was a good deal...

PE is the way to go... If my project ends up being sufficiently better than my prelude I'll be seeking to get it made in PE... Graduate Development Loan here I come...

From the manufacters point of view Why in the heck would I dump huge amounts of money and time into a new design when even if it is the hottest boat ever I may sale 30 boats of that design. I break even and maybe get a a moonpie for profit. By the time we market it r&d and talk to 100 customers for 2o min a piece I dont even get a moon pie

but really, most of the new kayak designs are very minor tweaks. no need to reinvent the wheel, just take alreay good designs and make them in PE. maxim, detonator, zoom...most only complain nthat they wear out too soon.

The problem with that is PE is heavy and you still have to make new molds and retool for each design. and then you get to hear the whinning about the wheight

Sure there is opportunity in the materials area - I dream of something with the durability of PE, the weight and set up cost of composite, composite, flexibility of hypalon (i.e. store it like an inflatable), and the cost of cardboard.

I don't know about the set up costs for the Twintex boats, but that seemed to be a moderately successful foray into a new material - not 100%, but you can't expect to hit a homerun all the time.

My dream material isn't likely some brand new compound, but some as yet untried combination, application, or processing of familiar materials.

PE weighs more... that's a fact... and one of the only issues I keep hearing about the L'edge with any regularity. Of course there are a lot of design elements you can do in the rotomolding process that you simply can't by forming from traditional methods... unless of course you want it made from 'glass' and you don't mind having a big seam going down the side. For the L'edge PE was easily the most obvious choice of material and process.

There's a few alternative materials out there but with those materials again comes the question of durablility and long term wear... and the fact that everyone seems to want it "all" which is a very tough order to fill if you really think about it.

Let's ponder this... why did Dagger, Blue-Hole and Whitesell get out of the ww-canoe business? Will we ever see a new design coming from Mad River... or Bell? Who's left? How long until those that are left in the game come out with another totally *new* canoe?

Well... the answer to that question and the onus lies upon all of you... the actual buying public.

FWIW... when I first started talking to Jacques about the L'edge I referred to it as my "Field of Dreams" boat... thusfar it seems to be working out o.k.

sbroam wrote:I don't know about the set up costs for the Twintex boats, but that seemed to be a moderately successful foray into a new material - not 100%, but you can't expect to hit a homerun all the time.

It's not much less $ than PE

I'm not too sure how well the material would hold up against the "I bounce down slightly wet rocks" crowd... but I really do like the weight the boats come in at...

Remember... at one point Robson was trying to make a creek kayak from Armerlite but they abandoned the project. Now... if they had offered a boat that was more of a "river runner" it might've taken off and been well recieved... but I guess we'll never know.

does esquif plan to take boats off the market as they continue to produce new designs?

despite all their differences, it seems like the prelude and l'edge for instance serve the same market (or type of paddler). does it make business sense for esquif to continue to produce both of them?

maybe that's a bad comparison because people love both, but it just seems strange to me that most other manufacturers have 5 or so boats on the market and esquif has like 15..

A few years ago I bought into the guilt trip laid out here that if consumers don't buy the product then the manufactures go away. Seemed easy enough for a capitalist mind to follow so in one year I bought two new boats. One was not available to demo anywhere. I purchased both on faith and the recommendations of others posted here on C-boats. Both were mistakes for me. I should never have bought either. I am sure that the people that liked them were being honest, which brings up the point that canoeists, even whitewater canoeists have a variety of tastes or expectations of boats that they purchase. One might be a boat that can take abuse for ten years, hence the popularity of PE. For me two important ones are hull speed and hull weight. Neither are satisfied by short plastic boats. For me, glass may be the way to go and just expect it to look like a quilt at the end of a season or less. "Twin-Tex like" materials hold some interest. If they were made just a little thicker and could be patched in the garage at home without need of vacuum bagging equipment then you might be on to something. In the meantime, I have little interest in spending two grand on a boat to keep a manufacturer in business so they can complain about their customer base on the forum.

Hmmm, In terms of new materials, UHMW PE could be a step forwards, It's stronger than HDPE, lighter than HDPE (after a certain length of polymer chain, the packing structure changes and it gets less dense), and would be less suceptable to hull gouging (it's as slippery as teflon)... It would however cost more.

john h wrote:does esquif plan to take boats off the market as they continue to produce new designs?

despite all their differences, it seems like the prelude and l'edge for instance serve the same market (or type of paddler). does it make business sense for esquif to continue to produce both of them?

maybe that's a bad comparison because people love both, but it just seems strange to me that most other manufacturers have 5 or so boats on the market and esquif has like 15..

Esquif does canoes, and they do them well so why not make one for each occasion... Dagger, Pyranha (inc Venture Kayaks and P&H), and valley canoe products (Valley [sea, surf and squirt] and Big Dog) all produce 15, 20 kayaks... Why shouldn't the only big canoe manufacturer do the same?

As for the prelude and the L'edge... I think they both have a place, the Prelude is narrow, fast and will reward agressive paddling... the L'edge is wide, not as fast and if it's as close to the fly as craig intended will happily accept agressive paddling, but not reward it.

My original point didn't have anything to do with the economics of boats. What I was getting at was that what we understand to be what a "traditional canoe" should look like was influenced in large part by the materials/processes used to make canoes. There are some shapes that you can't thermoform/stamp out/form from birchbark/mold in composite in one piece. It would be tough to make a something like a Spanishfly that way without doing it in two pieces with a seam. The result is that canoes stuck to shapes that could be produced with these methods. Really just a theory.

The economics of it are something different, and something I'm interested in for obvious reasons. I'm not yet convinced it's not possible to build boats based on a model where any given design might only sell 20-30 units...I guess I'll find out.

rodeoclown, i guess the question behind my comment was the one you just addressed: how many boats need to be sold to make the production worth it?

and krikkitwars, i agree they do it very well. and a boat for every occasion is great but are there enough people paddling every different style to warrant all the different models? what is esquif doing differently that allows them to have a bunch of models when the competition have so few?

this is getting away from the original point of the thread...