I’m taking one for the team here today and trying the new ‘Superlon’ nylon from skinboats.org. This is basically my job, figuring out what works and what doesn’t so my students can avoid the learning curve. There are a lot of really bad skinboat fabrics out there that the sellers will promise you works great.
This new fabric is appealing because it has a very soft hand, and the 10 ounce weight is a great compromise between my normal 8.5oz weight skin and the 12oz which I think is overkill for a kayak.
Unfortunately it has one major problem then had to have been obvious but I wasn’t told about. It’s coated with some sort of water repellent substance, so there was no way to wet the fabric get it to relax before stitching. I was about to cut it off the boat when Liz suggested we try hot water and sure enough that cut right through the coating, and luckily we have the ability here to hook up a hose directly to a hot water heater, so after emptying about 25 gallons of 130° water on it the fabric was wetted out and we could start stitching.
It’s a much harder fabric to stitch than my usual and even though it’s very soft it doesn’t have a lot of flex on the bias so I’m not sure if I could get it to wrap the shape of a greenland bow without wrinkles. I over-pulled my tightening lacing because I was worried about tension and ended up with some wrinkles I couldn’t get rid of at the end.
It seemed to shrink well when it dried out. The overall skinning process was about 40% more difficult than my normal process and a lot of that was just keeping the boat soaking wet while I was stitching.
I’ll figure out how much weight it adds to the boat today, and see how it takes coating tomorrow. I’d really like to put this stuff on a canoe but I’m not sure if it would wrap the shape or not without wrinkles.
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