Joe Underwood

The answer to your patch problem is Poly Tac! It's a high strength, fast drying, one part cement manufactured ESPECIALLY to attach polyester fabric to an airframe !! This stuff works and is great. I suggested a few weeks back about adding reinforcing tapes over high ware areas, keel and stringers but was shot down by Jeff about doing this. Sure it will not stop the ware on our skins but will give you one or two more layers to wear through before you have a hole in the bottom of your kayak. Might just get you home dry on a long extended trip. Nothing wrong with redundancy. Add your brass wear strip on top of your extra layer of reinforcing tape and you are better off without adding hardly any extra weight for more protection. Poly Tac is great for cementing polyester to its self for the patch you are wanting without having to sew the patch on first. Check out www.conaircraft.com/polyfiber/cement or just google Poly Tac . Tip of the Day: if you do decide to add a couple of layers of reinforcing tape to your keel make two different widths of tapes, say 2" and 4" putting the 2" on first then the 4" last. This will give you only two edges instead of four edges to hide when you paint your kayak if you want the tapes to disappear.

I have spent my life in aviation and recovered my share of old fabric covered air planes. With only 2 to 4 oz. cloth very similar to what we are covering our boats with. In areas of high wear or stress we would use what was call reinforcing tape. This tape was nothing more than the same material the plane was covered with just cut into strips and glued over the stress areas. This worked great and if done right after the plane was painted was very hard to see. I was planning to do this to the keel area of my Vardo. But going one step farther and putting two tape layers down there. The first tape being 4 inches wide the next layer 2 inches wide. That way you do not have but one layer of tape at a time to fill or blend in with paint to hide the two extra layers of covering to hide. This will not stop the wear going over rocks but you will have three layers of covering for twice the protection of the bottom of your pride and joy...

Consider milling the the two gunwales (heaviest boards in the kayak) into I beams. This was a common practice in older high performance aircraft where weight and strength were very important. This was done to the wing spares with great success and a part where failure was not an option. You would leave the gunwales at full size where the frames and lashings need to be. You would need the largest diameter router bit you could use so the radius on the webb where you lash the framing would be as big as it could be. You could easily take 1/4 of the weight of the gunwales away and not lose any strength. Think ounces and you"ll lose pounds in the end.