Red Lake Canoe - Quality Materials

An amazing light weight Hull

The Red Lake Canoe Company Prospector hull is made of four different materials that are sandwiched together to create an amazing lightweight hull.

1. Kevlar
2. Fibreglass
3. Vinylester Resin
4. Linear Structural Foam

Kevlar and Fibreglass

Kevlar is a brand name that Dupont has put on a fibre called Aramid. Kevlar is an extremely strong, lightweight, durable material but has the negative property that it is very expensive. Most canoe manufacturers either make a Kevlar canoe or a fiberglass canoe. Making a canoe completely out of Kevlar increases the price and puts a lot of Kevlar in places where it isn’t necessary.

In a Red Lake Canoe, the Kevlar provides additional strength where you need it most, on the outer surface waterplane area, in the bow and stern where rock impacts are likely to occur, and along the keel. These are shown to the left in a computer model of the Prospector as the yellow areas.

The upper sides of the canoe, in ship terms, are called shear strakes. These take loads in shear and do not need the large tensile strength that Kevlar has to offer. In these areas, a Red Lake Canoe utilizes a lightweight foam core to provide lots of shear strength as well as skins of fiberglass on the inside and outside to give it a very stiff feel.

If you take your finger and “poke” a Red Lake Canoe along the sides or bottom anywhere, you will not feel any give. You will not be able to push in the sides at all. If you do the same with a 100% Kevlar canoe, you will feel give in the sides and you’ll be able to push with your finger so that you’ll see the side move. This “give” is not a good thing with a canoe as it provides flexibility and makes it hard to paddle. A canoe that flexes with waves absorbs a lot of energy and that energy is coming from you.

The Poke Test One of the hall marks of a Red Lake Canoe is that there is no give to the surface of the canoe, even when poked with a finger. A stiffer canoe bleeds less energy. In short, this means that less energy is wasted by the canoeist when paddling.

The one place where a bit of flexibility is a good thing is in the rock impact zones. A bit of “local” give allows some of the rock impact energy to be absorbed by the hull by it flexing rather than cracking the hull. In these areas we have removed the core to allow a bit of flex but the flex is over a very small area and not enough to influence the overall stiffness of the hull. Although this hull is not meant for whitewater, we recognize that we all run into the occasional piece of granite.

Resin
The resin used in a Red Lake Canoe is VinylEster. VinylEster is a product that gives strength close to that of epoxy but is much easier to work with and significantly less expensive. The most common resin used in canoe manufacturing is Polyester. It is very inexpensive but lacks the strength of VinylEster or Epoxy.

Foam Core
The foam core of the canoe is the key to its stiffness. The foam used by Red Lake is sold under the name of Corecell and is manufactured in Quebec. Corecell is a Styrene Acrylo-Nitrile (SAN) type foam that is 1/8” thick. It provides some distance between two skins of fiberglass and Kevlar which creates something called a sandwich panel and increases the bending stiffness by orders of magnitude over just having the skins by themselves. This allows us to trim some weight from the skins but still exceed the stiffness of a much heavier standard canoe.

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