#13
#14
#11
SUSPENSION PACKAGE A lower seat results in paddling with your instep flat—kinesthetically disagreeable for all but the most elastic of boaters. Support
your shins with hollowed-out minicell foam blocks glued to the floor with contact cement. There’s no sense in sporting a pimped-out ride if you can’t pull off the swagger to match. Warning! Paddling with your instep flat can result in your toes extending underneath the foot pegs and has resulted in foot entrapments. Rivet plastic plate extensions on your foot pegs to prevent this, or rip them out and install foam toe blocks instead.
SignS Your Canoe needS a Makeover
»» a mischief of mice are nesting inside your vinyl float bags
»» The PaddLe SoLo, SLeeP TandeM sticker on your hull is less aesthetic enhancement, more structural necessity
#12
AFTERMARKET ACCESSORIES Install a
yoke in your tandem playboat…all those trippers can’t be wrong. Humping 55 pounds again and again to the top of the set can feel a lot more like work than play. A yoke leaves you with energy left over to paddle. Fine, sculpted cherry will make you smile every time you look at it—and at the frugal non-tuners nursing backaches at day’s end.
#13
H2O IN THE TRUNK Tired of your water bottle rolling
around your knees on a carabiner? Modfathers know the best place to stash fuel—be it a cylinder of nitrous or a Nalgene of water—is in the trunk. Remove the rear seat block on your saddle, carve out a bottle-sized channel with a band saw or router, replace the block and hold the bottle in place with a bungee cord bolted through the foam. Or use a fret saw to cut your bottle bunkie in situ.
#14
BODYWORK Using scrap material (broken hockey sticks
work well) for temporary thwarts, experiment with various hull shapes. The stability of smaller, flat-hulled boats like the Esquif Zoom improves by lengthening the rear thwart by an inch and shortening the bow thwart by half that. Hulls that are rounded and soft chined are seldom improved from factory specs. Making them wider just makes it harder to reach the water. Narrowing them can cause stability to disappear entirely.
BRIAN SHIELDS has been fine-tuning floating toys for 13 years, making handsome boats fit happy paddlers. Read Brian’s past Rapid features: “Building the Ultimate Tripping Canoe Part I and II”, and “Project Wood Gunwale” at www.
rapidmag.com/features/features-boats for detailed how-to instructions on canoe makeovers.
»» You have trouble finding new paddling apparel and accessories to match your hull colour—think teal
»» Car wash attendants, auto mechanics and used car salesmen say “dude, you need a new canoe” when it’s strapped atop your ’91 Chev Cavalier’s cracked windshield, scabby body panels, sagging doors and mismatched tires bearing more resemblance to Peter Mansbridge than goodyear ultra grips
»» The ash gunwales are so mouldy they are mistaken for black vinyl
»» The cracks along the chine are deeper than those in the windshield of aforementioned Cavalier —rapid
www.rapidmag.com 29
PHOTOS: JON MCPHEE
PHOTOS: LEFT, BRIAN SHIELDS / RIGHT, VIRGINIA MARSHALL
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