Carbon Greenland paddle Archive

Darth Kayak rides again…

Dusted off my greenland boat, nicknamed by persons other than myself as Darth Kayak,  at the weekend for the first time in ages.. I’ve been paddling it less and less frequently the last couple of years – it’s ultralight construction means it’s not robust enough for the flavour of paddling that friends and I most frequently get up to, and I never really got deeply into the whole greenland rolling scene, but having said that it …

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another post of a carbon flavour…

I feel as if I should apologise to my cycling readership for the recently rather kayak-heavy flavour of my posts… It’s not that I am not riding, I am.. it’s just that nothing exciting is going on in that department right now.. Just cruising around and not really missing the racing scene and attendant training schedules at all :-) I may have some adventure cycling flavour of news to share soon however but in the …

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another carbon Greenland paddle

I’ve just finished making myself a second carbon Greenland paddle. The first one has been a great success, very nice to use – comfortable and very efficient, and has proven itself more than tough enough. The reason for this new one is that I wanted to modify the blade profile slightly and vacuum bag the components rather than just rely on a hand layup. Rather than start again from scratch I simply modified the original …

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making a carbon Greenland paddle.. part 3: the paddle

Ok, here it is.. finally got around to writing up last bit, sorry for the wait.  I must also apologise for being something of a dummy and without thinking erasing the card that all the construction photos were on… so I only have a couple of pics plus the finished product. I’ll be making another incorporating lessons learned on this one however so I’ll take more pictures then… sorry :-( To make each blade half …

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making a carbon Greenland paddle.. part 2: the mould

As I write I have just finished laying up the carbon cloth to make the first section of paddle… if you want a stress free life I wouldn’t recommend this project… I’m well aware as I work that mistakes/problems are going to be expensive in both time and money invested and it is proving to be a devil of a job to get the cloth to conform to the mould without a vacuum… I’m not …

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Carbon Fairy comes.. (again)

progress on the paddle project has been slowed somewhat this last few days by a spell of fine weather, the Cornwall Sea Kayak Symposium, some bike riding, getting mashed in some large surf and essential outdoors work on my house… It’s not stalled completely however, a large roll of the black stuff arrived today, yum, and the plugs are just about finished.. I just have some final cleaning up and polishing to do before I …

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making a carbon Greenland paddle.. part 1: the plug

I had planned to present this all in one go, but it’s quite involved and time consuming so I decided to break it down into stages instead… gives me something to write about :-) This project is something I’ve been meaning to get around to for over a year, using my traditional wooden Greenland paddle with my carbon Greenland boat doesn’t feel quite right but the only commercially available carbon version I know of costs …

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