Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
-
Here are some pictures from a Westwater Canyon trip that I went on in October. I tagged along with a very friendly group of experienced packrafters, one of whom risked a precarious perch to take some excellent photos of people paddling through Skull Rapid. The rocks in the backround are some of the oldest in North America, dating back to the Precambrian era. I had a blast on this trip, and my Skeena handled very well through some Class II/III waves.
-
I finished my DIY Skeena kit a few months ago, and just got back from a 4-day trip on the Escalante. The river was running low and I scraped the bottom and sides against plenty of rocks, but fabric still looks in fine shape. Before the trip I converted it into a self-bailer and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. I cut down an old Thermarest to use as the inflatable floor insert (I think it was Bruce who recommended that in the forum). I think I’m going to make a new seat and shorten the baffles by an inch or two so I don’t sit quite so high, but other than that it worked exactly like I hoped it would. The top portion of my seat was leaking pretty quickly. I got tired of regularly blowing it back up and decided to just leave it deflated.
I used pieces of extra seam strip fabric to iron on the name (“the Flying Hellfish”). I had a friend of mine who’s a talented artist draw in the jaws and eyes with a sharpie, and I used seam grip mixed with white or black ceramic pigment to paint his design. The red part above the lower jaw is supposed to be the tongue, but it didn’t turn out quite how I wanted it to. I’m going to use more black seam grip to modify the shape of it a bit. It seems very durable, to answer a question posed elsewhere in the forum.
-
I’m having the same issue with blue fabric from a packraft that I ordered on June of last year. The fabric is delaminating from the TPU at the seam strips, and the exposed fabric is fraying badly. I’ve gone over the outsides of the seam strips with Seam Grip, and it appears to have halted the fraying. It looks pretty messy but is still holding air.
-
Thanks Przemek and Matt! I’m looking forward to starting on my Telkwa kit, it arrived a couple weeks ago. DIY Packraft was a really great idea Matt, I’ve been wanting to do this trip for years but didn’t have $1,000 to pony up for an Alpacka. Plus it was fun to customize the boat and really make it unique.
-
