For understandable reasons, the most common questions I get about skin on frame have to do with durability. Just like every boat the answer has to do with how it’s built.
My general approach to choosing scantlings and coverings for my skin boats is to start out by building light and then abusing the heck out of the boats to find out where the weak spots are to see if I can reinforce just those particular areas to keep weight to a minimum.
My standard layup of red cedar, white oak, 9 ounce nylon and four coats of two-part polyurethane has similar weight and durability to a medium weight carbon-Kevlar canoe.
My heavy lay-up of spruce/pine, white oak, 12 oz nylon, and two extra coats of polyurethane on the bottom, is going to have a similar weight and performance to some of the newer tough composites.
In general both lay ups will be much more resistant to extreme impacts but less resistant to sustained abrasion.
The canoes we took on the John Day weren’t really designed for river running, they just happened to be what was sitting in the yard at the time. Using overloaded flat water canoes meant that the maneuverability really sucked this time down the river, so we crashed into things a lot. My current hull shaping, and our normal camping load (40lbs each instead of 70) would’ve helped a lot here.
(Liz also wants you to know that me paying attention to paddling instead of filming would’ve helped even more!)
Here’s an entertaining video of some of the things we crashed into and the consequences. Pay special attention to the sound on the second clip. That’s the full force of about 550 fast moving pounds coming to an abrupt stop on the rocks!
After 8 days we had few bad scratches on the bottom, but nothing penetrating the coating. This is about what I would expect from any canoe of about the same weight. (These weigh about 30lbs each).
This layup used as intended usually gives an average lifespan of about five years before reskin. Using it like this constantly might reduce that down to as little as a year, which is why it makes sense to bump up to 12 ounce if you’re really going to be beating the heck out of them.
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