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Boundary Waters, June 2014

Fiberglass is often found in Kevlar boats. Boats usually have lots of pieces of fabric in various shapes. I'll bet there is f/g in the stems though I don't know for sure.

For example my DragonFly is kevlar , glass and carbon fiber. The location of the reinforcement dictates the fabric. There are 38 pieces of fabric. Some are full blankets and some partials. and some footballs.

However I do think my SR is all kevlar.. There seem to be two layers of full blanket which is see through and the ribs have more than two layers of fabric over them. Same for the stems.
 
The kevlar used by Bell is the color of the stems and some of those reinforcement strips, gold and black checkered. A Kevlight boat from Bell with a clear gel coat or skin coat wold be solidly that pattern. A fiberglass boat with either a clear gel or skin coat would be a translucent white. Bell did make the Northstar in fiberglass layup (with foam core and ribs) but not recently. I've only seen a couple and they all had colored gel coats. Except the one I mentioned above that was available at ORC after they had quit building boats. Supposedly it was the first boat they built at ORC and it was a clear fiberglass layup with kevlar reinforcement in the stems and some of the ribs.

Alan
 
There were some other Bell layups:

This what Charlie Wilson wrote on P net

Didn't we just go through this? Anyway:

Bell's Fiberlar was a three blanket E glass lamination with a gel coated exterior with an arimid partial bottom with a polyester core-mat center and some arimide stem pieces. Fiberlar was discontinued when ABS came on line, ~2000.

White / Gold had an e glass outer blanket under a gel coated exterior, an arimide bottom with a core mat center, an arimide blanket, an arimide diamond and another arimide inner blanket that, after the mid 90's was 25% black Kevlar 29 and 75% Kevlar 49, the Bell "tweed". I use the term arimide because Bell started purchasing European goods which must be Twaron, not Kevlar, in the early 2000s. Every other woof strand is black aramide #29.

Both Fiberlar and White/Gold hulls had a cor-mat bottom cookie, which stiffens the bottom but resists deformation when thwart length is fiddled.
Core mat cores always seemed to flatten the boats a little compared to Black/Gold, all fabric, construction.

Kev-Krystal, later Kev Lite, is a two layer "Tweed" hull with aramide quarters, foam core and sometimes ribs and tweed foam covers. Early versions had, usually, clear gel but could be special ordered in opaque shades. Later versions are skin coated.

The lack of a pre-form oven means flat bottom cores rebound a little when the vacuum is dropped, resulting in a slightly flat bottom. Aluminum rails tend to hog the boat as they are not pre-shaped and the lightweight laminate drops it's stems a little from the straightening effect of the rails along the sheerline.

Pre 94 Kel Lite and Kev Delux Hulls had a 30" longitudinal section of s glass immediately under the gel coat, this was dropped for cosmetic and weight reasons in 1994.

Black/Gold started with clear gel, which could be special ordered opaque and is now often skin coated. The lamination starts with a carbon blanket, carbon bottom and center diamond, all black, then a tweed blanket, a tweed bottom and diamond and another tweed inner blanket. Newer black/gold hulls may have foam cores. Almost all tandems and Magic have foam cores replacing several layers of fabric to reduce weight.

The above from my Word Perfect file "Bell Lamination Schedules" dated 1994, later converted to Word and last updated 1999.
 
I don't find any of Charlies postings in that thread. He was a principal at Bell so should know what he and they were working with.
 
I was incorrect above when I stated I'd seen a few Bell fiberglass canoes. I was thinking of their white gold layup and forgot that even those have an inside layer of kevlar, and in my mind I guess I still consider them a fiberglass boat. I've seen Charlie's list you posted above before and I'm at a loss to say which layup Gavia has, unless it's Fiberlar, which I know nothing about. That seems to be the only layup from the above list that's all fiberglass inside and out with some strategically placed pieces of kevlar. Am I reading something wrong?

What got me interested in the first place was that the only time I'd seen a similar looking boat was another Northstar in that BWCA.com thread linked above, and seeing how Gavia and ORC were both from Wisconsin I thought he was the one that ended up buying it. ORC was claiming the Northstar in question was indeed a fiberglass layup and that it was the first boat produced in their facility. Whether or not that's correct I don't know. The assumption being that it was used as a test run and wasn't meant to be sold. But once ORC was no longer manufacturing Bell canoes they didn't see the point in keeping it around anymore so sold it off pretty cheap. If I'm not mistaken (though I certainly could be) I was thinking Charlie didn't go to ORC, so perhaps they did some things on a small scale that he wasn't aware of. Maybe they made a handful of these fiberglass boats getting their process down (with less expensive materials) and sold some of them. I don't know but it's got me curious.

Alan
 
What got me interested in the first place was that the only time I'd seen a similar looking boat was another Northstar in that BWCA.com thread linked above, and seeing how Gavia and ORC were both from Wisconsin I thought he was the one that ended up buying it.

I didn't buy the boat in the BWCA.com thread, but it's the same layup.
 
I was in the BWCA in 1985 and always planned to back. Moose L to the Horse River to the Big Current. I miss the loons. We drank out of the lakes back then.

It would be fun to rent one of those 42 pound Kevlar lake monsters. We rented aluminum boats in those days. I have a friend that paddled the Boundary Watersfor several weeks in 1938. He graduated from U of Michigan in forestry right before then. His outfitter was Sig Olsen.
 
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