A bad break

[milkman]

After cracking my 5-year-old Prelude, I pulled a spare out of my garage's rafters. This was a Prelude I had bought from a friend that hadn't owned it for more than a year and had paddled it only sometimes as he is mostly a C1er. On my second trip out on the boat, I go over a sharp rock and hear a horrible crack. The plastic split under the seat. I now have three Preludes waiting for an Esquif shipment of Prelude plastic for welding.

This has me thinking. Many of us now have experience with PE boats. Until my 5-year-old Prelude broke, I was feeling pretty good about their durability. Even when the 5-year old one broke, I wasn't too upset. I had gotten at least 300 paddling days out of it. Divide $1500 by 300 and you get $5 a day. Pretty reasonable.

This recent break has me more concerned. I would estimate the original owner took it out 20 times at the maximum. I paddled it twice. Dividing $1500 by 22, you get $68 a day. Not so hot. Of course, the break could have just been a fluke. It could have happened to any boat. It did seem like this particular Prelude though was especially brittle. My old one took a lot of similar hits and scrapes on sharp pointy rocks. After all, I live in basalt country.

I now have three Preludes (counting my wife's) broken in the last month to weld. My wife is paddling a new one I bought for her. I'm going to tape up the best of the three broken ones and use that untill I get the welding plastic. I should point out that we're not steep creekers or anything. Our regular diet is class 3+ runs with a few class 4 rapids thrown in.

These recent experiences have me wondering about PE. Not that I want to go back to Royalex. Or could. I understand that PE can be kind of tricky and that they can be bad hulls and good hulls depending on how carefully they were manufactured to plastic specs. I'd love to confidently buy PE boats, such as another Prelude. Richard of Mohawk was asking what makes us buy a new canoe or design. Sometimes, it's often because I've broken a boat. My recreation is my favorite reason to spend money and I like to have a good solid ride underneath me when I go to paddle in the boonies.

How are other people feeling about PE these days? Have you had long lasting (5 years or more) PE canoes, c1s or kayaks? Or are cracks part of the PE game? I'm tempted to try a different hull to see if that makes a difference. Maybe it's time to finally get an Option out to Oregon.

[ezwater]

PE becomes less and less satisfactory as you go from small, quasi-tubular ww kayaks, up through ww OC-1s like the Prelude, up to the redoubtable Coleman Ram-X. Both the weight and the susceptibility to damage increases with size. A large expanse of flattish PE is more easily damaged than a small curvature of the thick stuff used in ww kayaks.

A thing to watch is scratches inside a PE boat caused by sandy heels or similar. These can propagate into complete splits. I lost my venerable Sage Miss Piggy from inside scratches where my big feet scraped the inside. If you find splits in a foot scratch zone more than once, consider lining the zone where you stand and kneel with thin foam or something.

[yarnellboat]

FYI Mark, on the local Vancouver (BC) forum, there has been talk about doing a group buy from Blackfly...

http://paddlenet.myfastforum.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Cheers, Pat.

[Einar]

O.K., it's a cheap shot but I gotta take it.

"Looks like your new plastic welder will amortize out nicely"
e

[Dave.E]

How are other people feeling about PE these days? Have you had long lasting (5 years or more) PE canoes, c1s or kayaks? Or are cracks part of the PE game? I'm tempted to try a different hull to see if that makes a difference. Maybe it's time to finally get an Option out to Oregon.

I really like PE and probably wouldn't go to another material. Here are a couple reasons:
- Slides over rocks smoothly
- Any hull I would want to paddle only comes in PE
- Very easy to weld. Much easier than composite repair/patching royalex. Looks cleaner too
- Kayaks come in PE which gives a TON of C1 options

[milkman]

PE becomes less and less satisfactory as you go from small, quasi-tubular ww kayaks, up through ww OC-1s like the Prelude, up to the redoubtable Coleman Ram-X.

The Prelude is narrower than the Option and L'edge, which might make it less prone to cracking than those boats... though recent experience suggests perhaps not.

"Looks like your new plastic welder will amortize out nicely"

Too true, too true.

[ian123]

Options and octanes aren't breaking more often than preludes. I doubt the new l'edges are breaking more frequently also.

[clt_capt]

There have been issues with certain colors of pigments being notorious for cracking in the past. Are your boats stored inside or outside?

[milkman]

Preludes are orange and stored inside in an unheated garage. I even cover them with a ground cloth to protect them from the UV light from the garage's windows.

BTW, I wasn't implying that Options crack more or less than Preludes. In fact, I was thinking perhaps less. I don't think I've ever seen on this forum a mention of a crack in an Option ... though I'm sure it happens.

Two of the Preludes I'm repairing have proven themselves to be quite durable with lots of use (5 years for one, 3 years for the other). I'm mostly concerned with the one that has probably only been out 20 times and whether that is a brittle boat. It might just have been really bad luck.

I stripped two of the Preludes down today and am just waiting for some of the fabled Esquif plastic to make its way to me to weld them. The other one I'm just going to tape up and paddle until one of the other boats is serviceable.

[JimW]

I'm not sure how relevant my experience of kayaks really is.

I've seen boats from all the main manufacturers split over the years, but rarely one of my own. Different colour pigments and different fillers used by different manufacturers seems to affect the brittleness of their boats at different times. I don't like to single out manufacturers the one we used to complain about a lot over here is now one of the top choices for creek boats so they must have turned it around and bringing up an old reputation that is no longer valid can be damaging to companies trying to do their best for their customers. I never heard of problems with their Preludes, but then I never heard much about their Preludes period!

Seems to me the Prelude should be less prone to splitting than bigger boats or boats with flat panels, but thickness of material will come into the equation as will each manufacturers formula.

The Prelude was originally designed before there were specific heavy walled creek boats, I'd hesitate to claim it was designed as a playboat, but certainly the originals were probably not as thick as a L'edge or an Option (opinions from those with access to all the above?). Maybe Esquif have been keeping it at the original weight and haven't thought of thickening it up to compete with the more modern creekers for durability on creeks?

I'm not suggesting you are a boat basher (or your wife) - I've seen your videos and know you have much more skill than me, just that maybe our kind of paddling isn't what Esquif envisaged their Preludes being used for when they offer the L'edge for that sort of thing....???

[the great gonzo]

First off, I think that the overall properties of linear PE (flex, impact resisstance, weldability, recyclability) make it the first choice in my eyes for creaking or any other rocky low volume runs.
As with any other materials the manfacturing process has a huge influence on the end quality of the boat. The same is true for the specific formulation of material used. Unless it is a single source material, like Royalex, then it is not necessarily all the same. There are multiple suppliers for watersports-grade PE, with different formulations, that all have different properties. Some are more sensitive to things like process variations than others. I distinctly remember that about a decade ago Riot came out with a new plastic called Xytec, which supposedly had the stiffness of blow molded, the resistance of crosslinked and the recyclability of linear PE. But it turned out that in the end the plastic was very sensitive to process variations, 2 friends of mine at the time bought Snipers as creekers at the same store within a time frame of about 1 month. One boat developed a huge S-shape crack on the bottom on the first day out, the first time it had any significant rock contact. The second boat is still in use and still going strong.
Does all this mean that PE should be avoided? No.
My personal experience with PE has been excellent. I have had many PE boats, some of them for a good decade and they have all held up much better than an RX boat wou;ld have under the same creeking experiences. Some of those boats have been passed on to other users and needed to be welded due to wear on the floor, like the PAC's Prelude, which already had a very thin floor by the time I passed it on to him in 2009, but it has been welded by Squeakyknee and is still going strong.
I don't think that the prelude is any less strong by default than other boats. But there may have been formulation changes when the mold changed hands from Pyranha to Esquif (Mine were/are both Pyranhas) as well as while in posession of one manufacturer, which may account for some difference in property.
As far as welding the boat, I personally don't really stress out too much whether or not the plastic I am using is from the same manufacturer. When welding boats in Mexico or Costa Rica, one has to use whatever is at hand. I have cross matched Esquif, Liquid Logic, Jackson, Pyranha Dagger and Big Dog plastic and, as long as the weld is done properly it holds up just fine.

TGG!

[PAC]

Agree with TGG. Helps when you paddle more h2o than granite. For boat, paddle and body. Everyone bangs rocks - occasionally - but try to be more gentle when doing it!

[arhdc]

RodeoClown can better address this but I can state with some confidence that there have been very, very, few Options cracked, only one that I know of that was a non blem and that one survived Tommy Hag for three years before cracking (I say it was a cry for help). Octanes are a bit more susceptible to cracking due to larger, flatter surfaces, but still hold up well. The newer Light L'Edges seem to be less crack prone than the original L'Edges but continue to crack more often than any of the Blackfly boats.

[milkman]

Thanks for the info on the Blackfly boats. If I keeping cracking Preludes I may try an Option. Not ready to jump ship yet. Making small whitewater canoes out of PE is still fairly new in the industry and hopefully the canoe manufacturers are looking for ways to constantly improve the durability of their designs through whatever means they can (thicker/thinner, carefully monitoring of the manufacturing process, designing hulls that handle/distribute the force of an impact better). Meanwhile, myself and the rest of the cboats community will keep testing them in the field and reporting back. For the record, before cracking, one Prelude lasted 5 years of 50+ days of paddling each year, one lasted three years, and one rather new one seemed to just be unlucky to go right over a really sharp rock. Overall, I've been pleased with the hull durability. I just wish all three hadn't cracked within the same three week span. It did result in another sale for Esquif as I bought a 4th Prelude.

[insolence]

how long had the Prelude been stored, that you got from your friend?
even if not being used and stored inside, polymeric materials like PE can age and additives in the plastic can get lost.

At some point, boats on rocks will crack. I've seen Options crack, too.

Another factor is the gunwale setup. I have experienced that boats with wooden gunnels do break more easily, due to the failure behaviour of Wood, and this has nothing to do with the plastic since it is more of a structural instability. I'm using wooden gunnels because of the weight advantages, but I keep in mind that this makes the boat less strong

I'm in Préludes, too, and so far I've been happy with the durability. I am really rough on boats and gear