C-Forum

I have a Mitchell Premier with a broken blade. The blade was caught between rocks and broke about one third of the way up from the tip. It's not completely broken off, but the carbon facing is cracked and if pressure is applied it's pretty obvious that the wood core is comprimised too. My plan is to wrap the cracked area in glass with the hope it can still serve as a back up/easy water paddle. My question is how many layers of glass would be needed?

Contact Mitchell. I did the exact thing and they were great. For a very reasonable fee they repaired the paddle and sent it back. It has had 4 years hard use since and no problem.
They earned a customer for life with the great customer service they gave me.

Mtichell will repair it and my guess is it will be a superior repair job compared to what you would do.

They have the shop, tool, materials, and experience. It's a great paddle so let the pros repair it.

I broke the wood blade on my Premier and sent it back to Mitchell who repaired at much less cost than a second paddle. It is still my primary paddle. If yours is a carbon blade, I suggest you seriously consider letting them take care of it proper. Btw, do you have pics you can post?

Or, you can open up that crack, make it bigger, exposing the broken wood. Clamp paddle in a vise, while carefully bending the blade to expose the damage in the wood, flood said area with epoxy, let blade bend back to it's original shape, excess epoxy will ooze out. Position paddle blade so not too much resin drips out. Let dry, sand area well, both sides of break. Epoxy a carbon "band-aid" to both sides. Cover with peel-ply, let dry. Sand lightly, spray with a clear gloss acrylic spray paint and voila!

Thank you for the suggestions. No doubt Mitchell could fix it and fix it well. However I'm not putting money into it. The paddle has several other ailments and there are several other paddles on the rack to use. I'm going with the bandaid approach and we'll see what happens!

^^what Kaz said. I had a partially broken Mitchell Carbon blade w/wood core and did just that, using one layer of 6 oz. Carbon. I also repaired another, Kober paddle that was Carbon only using the same technique.

Here's the Kober (not much effort went into final sanding, I could have taken more care to apply enough pressure on the layup though!!)



Oh yeah did that Schlegel, too.. same thing, partial break, two-sided cover-up after glueing the structure back in place.



I'd do the repair in two steps, filling up the crack first, then sanding ooze.out then applying the carbon "band-aid".
Filling the material that's used to fill the crack with some kind of filler makes the joint stronger and/or lighter (like using low density filler). If it's a nice break-point that just fits back together nicely, I'd forgo that step though.

Make sure you wear a respirator when sanding (especially green/not completely cured) epoxy laminates!
MSDS' don't lie ;D

Cheers and wish you success.. it will work & take some more abuse before retirement for sure ;D

Jan