"Lite" Glass

Kind of a long story but worth the reading. Read on. Here is the brainchild of our development with KEVLAR and Carbon Fiber. Working with KEVLAR and Carbon Fiber for a  number of years has been an incredible learning experience. First, you need to understand that designing and building with composites you work within a triangle of three things "Weight", "Price", "Durability." You get any "two" of the three which can make marketing a real nightmare. In the first few KEVLAR prams we built we found that using KEVLAR allowed us to build a very lightweight and strong pram and use a fabric that was almost 3 times lighter ! Now, the flip side was (is) that KEVLAR is much more flexible. This is how Kevlar absorbs the impact of a speeding bullet spreading the impact over a large area by dispersing the impact down the fibers without breaking them. In our application the floor seemed too flexible to stand on comfortably (you can stand on it but it has a much softer feel). So we had some fabric hanging on the wall that was a sample we received from one of our suppliers who said "this stuff would be a great boat building fabric". Well, we were "way too smart" to actually use it so we hung it on the wall. Well, we stiffened the floor of the KEVLAR pram up with a layer of this "magic fabric" hanging on the wall because it was handy. What we found was that we could stiffen the bottom up about 3 fold and only added 4 pounds (this was on a 10' Hopper II). Stupidity being the norm at that point we decided to look into reverse engineering our glass prams using this new fabric. We built two prams out of this new material using less of an overlap of fabric, replaced the steel seat pan for one we built out of KEVLAR, didn't gelcoat the interior but did web it with the base color of the boat. What we ended up with was a Stillwater Classic that weighed in at under 60# ! IN GLASS. A stiffer floor and about 20# lighter than our standard glass version. This will be our most popular line of prams and no we won't tell you what the fabric is.

Technical Specifications