Video: What Is a Canoe Made Of?

White water canoes have to be tough, so it's important that they be made from durable materials such as Royalex. Learn about different materials used to make canoes in this free online instructional video.

Video Transcript

White water canoes are made tough so they can hit rocks and bounce back and while there are varieties of different designs there are only a few different construction methods. The most common one is the royalex this material which is a sandwich between vinyl ABS, and ABS foam another layer of ABS and another layer of vinyl. So these layers of vinyl on the outside prevents the UV from damaging the inside layers and ABS and the ABS foam give the boat the rigidity and the strength it needs to be able to resist those impacts. This boat is AB is royalex and you can see that it is taking some abuse already it's taken some dents and comes right back it's able to stand a fair amount of scraping over rocks and hitting rocks. Another important component of the construction of these boats are the gunwales, these areas on the top edge of each side and these gunwales have aluminum on the inside and vinyl on the outside to give the boats from rigidity and some resistance to rapping and to changing shape. The other part of the boat that's really important in the structure is the ward. These cross wards again maintain the width of the boat and they maintain the rigidity of the boat, so if it does hit something it doesn't get damaged. A new material thats out and one that's showing some promises is a material thats a composite this is polypropylene with a matrix and this material does take a fair amount of beating and bounce back although is you can see if you do over stress it, it could be cracked. This one is repairable which is a disadvantage of royalex and royalex is very difficult to repair well. This material is some repairable so there are some composites out boats out there and some composites construction options that can be fairly tough. But for the toughest longest lasting boats royalex is really the way to go.

What Is a Canoe Made Of?

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