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Looks like royalex is back!

It's not Royalex and it remains to be seen if it will remain a proprietary material for Esquif. If you don't have an Esquif dealer, what do you do? They do ship far and wide.
 
Yeah they are calling it T-Formex. They say it will be 10 percent lighter and more 20 times more abrasion resistant than Royalex.
I would bet the other companies will be using it too.
 
I'm switching to wood/canvas anyway so it doesn't matter to me. But it is hard to imagine that royalex or a similar material will not be manufactured somewhere - Esquif or elsewhere. It is an excellent material for canoes - but unfortunately not much else.
 
Jacques Chasse of Esquif has indicated that the material will be made available to other canoe manufacturers. Although it has been disclosed that the core of the material will be ABS (as for Royalex), Jacques is not disclosing what the outer skins will consist of. That raises questions as to the ability to easily outfit or patch this new material. Saying that it will be more abrasion resistant suggests the possibility that the outer solid strata might be polyethylene. If true, this would be both good and bad. Poly is more abrasion resistant than ABS (which is why a lot of whitewater open boaters gave up on Royalex) but it is also much more difficult to get anything to bond to.
 
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