16.5 ft. solo, carbon fiber outside, Kevlar inside, with wood strip core vacuumed in place. Weight is 34 lbs.
This is a 16.5 ft. cedar strip canoe with redwood accents. It weighs about 38 lbs.
This is my first cold molded Kevlar canoe with foam core. it's an 18.5 ft.
tandem that weighs about 23 lbs. out of the mold. The inwales were added
before pulling from the mold. Once complete it weighs about 43 lbs.
This shot is taken right after the foam core was bagged in place, and all
the bagging material pulled. It looks black around the core because the first
layer was carbon fiber. I'll laminate Kevlar over the entire area to finish.
The finished tandem.
A close up of the bagging process.
Here I'm in the process of making a mold of the 16.5 ft. solo
seen in some of the pictures here. The process is to build a plug (that's the black
part, which is the exact form I want the canoe to look like), and take a mold of it.
The red part is half of the mold. It has to be built in halves because of the extreme tumblehome
in the canoe. If it wasn't split I'd never be able to get it out of the mold. The next step
is to build the other half of the mold.
Another shot of the finished canoe with a happy customer.
The first canoe out of a new mold should be a gelcoat boat, and I knew someone that
wanted a blue one so here it is with the Otter Canoe logo.
The first picture is a solo that is just being finished up, and a couple shots of different style seats.