Arkansas Canoe Club Forums

I recieved a phone call today from a reporter. He wanted to know about the soon to be royalex shortage. I had not heard of this at all. Well I called my contacts at now (polyone) used to be Spartech. They informed me as of spring next year they will not be making anymore royalex sheets!

I hope that another company buys this division out. But not likely I'd imagine due to the costs of purchasing this brand and the necessary material to make roll stock plastics.

I currently have 22 Sheets I will be making into Arkota canoes. And hope to buy one more batch before the end of Royalex is apon us.

Please send polyone a message not to discontinue royalex!!

http://www.polyone.com/en-us/Contact/Pages/default.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanks!
Louis -TBC

http://www.rapidmedia.com/canoeing/cate ... dium=email" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I've been reading about this possibility for a year now, ever since PolyOne bought out the prior owner, Spartech, which was losing money hand over fist. If Royalex (and Royalite) goes away after it's 42 year reign, will canoe manufacturers find a suitable substitute either as good or better? Do all of the manufacturers together consume enough sheets to make continued production of Royalex viable? Linier polyethelyne works but is heavy and not very rigid. Crosslink polyethelyne is better but still heavy. Various composites have their niches, but while repairability is good, impact and abrasion durability isn't and this is where the nearly half a century old Royalex shines.

I believe the shift of interest from canoes to kayaks is partially to blame as much as rising petroleum prices. Maybe a new (to canoes) moldable composite will come on the scene if/when the Royalex sheets become scarce to unavailable. As bad as it sounds right now, the loss of Royalex may herald some new innovations in composites sheets like an ABS/Aramid/Poly lamanate. I only hope our few remaining canoe manufacturers can weather the storm.

Michael

A "behind the scenes" look at the dynamics and reasoning for the plant closings (and product discontinuing) of Spartech assets by Polyone from a leading plastics industry newsgroup, Plastics News.

Note that the Warsaw, Illinois factory (formerly owned by Uniroyal along with the Royalex patents and I.P., and home to the first "Warsaw Rockets" Royalex canoe hulls) is mentioned multiple times in the article.

http://www.plasticsnews.com/article/201 ... six-plants#" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Anyone in the market for a 20' Pizza oven?

Michael -- I share your hopes that the demise of Royalex will simply mean future innovation and creation of materials that are lighter, stronger and less expensive. I have always been a big proponent of Prijon's blow-molded plastic -- TOUGH! Pretty light. And possibly indestructible.

Well, competition with Royalex (weight, price, durability) in the past led to the cross-link polyethelene canoes which are "rotomolded" in a way, but there is yet another alternative outcome to Polyone's decision to end production of Royalex. Aside from the remote possibility that they would sell the facility in Warsaw along with intact production machinery and the production rights and I.P. to go with it (assuming that some entrepreneur could run it profitably whereas Spartec could not), there is the possibility of Royalex continuing production offshore. As in a facility in Asia already doing molding of ABS.

For instance, the automotive plastics molding company I was a production engineer for in Northeast Arkansas was closed and moved to China after I left in 2001-2002. Supposedly they could import dunnages of raw materials, produce the molded parts and export them back to the States for assembly at a great cost-savings to the U.S. manufacturer.

I remember well carrying my new Coleman canoe home on the roof of a Honda Civic. The canoe came in an unassembled kit and the hull was so floppy that it wrapped over the roof of my car, nearly touching the road both in front and in back. The single layer poly hulls only worked because they used a complete inner aluminum skeleton to give them some rigidity. They were cheap, but quite heavy. And had little UV inhibitor in the plastic, were prone to cracking at the gunnels and very difficult to repair.

Crosslink poly was/is better, but still not as good as Royalex.

You are right -- if we see Royalex again it will likely be produced overseas where production costs can be better contained. Seems fabrication entails a lot of manual labor (as well as difficult to acquire ingredients) and if it were produced here it would price itself out of the market. In fact, one might argue -- and do not take that literally -- it has already done so.

The entry level paddler is a large and powerful driving market force and is more likely to buy a "plastic" canoe/SOT/SUP at a box store or via the internet than a store specializing in recreational paddling. And given that Royalex is chiefly a single use (canoe hull) item -- and I wasn't able to find any production figures -- I'd wager that fewer than 20,000 8x25' sheets of Royalex would meet the demand. So I guess a question may be if the savings in production costs -- sadly achieved primarily by using offshore labor -- will be sufficient to support construction of a new -- or relocation of the old -- fabrication facility that produces a product for which there is little demand at a cost deemed acceptable to the consumer.

P.S. This thread persuaded me to replace my 21 year old badly beat-up, heavily used, poorly stored but still functional Royalex Old Town Tripper -- a boat that I consider a "classic" for long haul camping trips. Ouch! With a little care the new boat should take me all the way to my grand exit but at a cost that bites. I hope whatever replaces Royalex is kinder to my wallet.

P.P.S. Royalex specs: http://www.spartech.com/CES/Royalex.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

P.P.P.S. Love the Coleman story. Having grown up with Coleman mantle lanterns and stoves I remember the first time I saw a Coleman canoe. At that time its chief competitor was aluminum -- in many ways Coleman is responsible for bringing "plastic canoes" to the mass market. As you state they weren't the best boats available but they were affordable and readily available. Like Pelican today, the Coleman boats brought a lot of people to water.

A bit more on the Royalex sheets, if you will bear with me (and I trust that Louis and others will correct me if I am in error), each manufacturer of canoes has their own specifications for the raw sheets ordered. Not only colors, but in just where in the sheet the ABS layer is reenforced with interior "patches". They are generally not of one uniform thickness from end to end and side to side. Bows, sterns, sometimes keel lines, sometimes cross hull reenforcement patches are added per spec for each hull design and hull length. Thus Spartech could not run 10,000 uniform sheets in a percent of green exterior vinyl, a percent in red, blue, yellow, purple, tan, etc. and they be saleable to all of the manufacturers for all canoes of all lengths and width. A "TBC Arkota" sheet could not be moulded into an Old Town Tripper. Or a Bell or a Clipper, Scott, Holy Cow, etc. Profits were, I am pretty sure, much better back in the day when the only hull designs were being molded on the original Uniroyal molds and copies of them by Blue Hole etc. But the reenforcing patches not only added to the cost of hand labor before vulcanizing, but limited the marketability of the custom sheets and increased the scrap rate of the manufacturers who molded from those sheets. John Williamson, from what I have read, pioneered foregoing the interior "patches" and just ordering thicket sheets to begin with. He said it cut his reject losses in half. That would have been circa 1993-94 when he reopened the Blue Hole company in Gordonsville, Virginia. Of course it made his molded hulls heavier and more expensive. I have read that the Royalex sheet price jumped about 20% as soon as Polyone bought out Spartech.

When I bought my new Coleman, a new Blue Hole OCA cost around $750-$850. I believe I paid under $300 for the Coleman 17'. And you are correct that the new version of the Coleman... Pelican etc., is a fine entry level canoe and works well enough for it's intended customers. I could buy one of them any day of the week for $200-$300 from an owner who tried paddling one and decided the romance did not coincide with the reality.

As for the Coleman's durability, I ran the Hailstone during the flood of '82 in my seventeen footer with a styro dock billet for center flotation. We never had to stop and dump water, and the canoe hull was relatively unscathed.

I just bought a Royalex canoe from a forum member in Memphis. Moulded, outfitted and sold new in 1987, the now 26 year old hull and heavy gunnels and thwarts were as good as new, excepting some fading of the outside vinyl layer and a bit of oxidizing of the aluminum. With care, I expect the reoutfitted canoe to last me the rest of my life, especially rotated out with my other three specialty canoes (two OT crosslink poly and one FG composite). I could be tempted at some point to take on a red Royalex OCA though. Or an Arkota. Before Royalex becomes a thing of the past.

Esquif published the following on their FaceBook page today:

"Some of you may have seen the article written by Kaydi Pyette of Rapid Media recently concerning ‪#‎Royalex‬ (the link is below). Esquif has secured enough Royalex for our 2014 production including an anticipated increased demand. Esquif is working on and is very confident about a long term solution. Also, don’t forget about our very successful ‪#‎Twintex‬ material.

http://www.rapidmedia.com/canoeing/cate ... -dead.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; "

I hope they are right.. And I've already spoke with twin-tex. Esquif has used this twin-tex with success but composites are not a secret. Baging > baking twin-tex could be a good alternative.. Still very $$$$

Vacuume bagging for Twintex takes a whole different setup than the Royalex, right? Esquif supposedly overcame the cracking and delamination problems they had with Twintex early on. If I understand correctly, it is a poly/fiberglass strand matrix material. Will TBC Royalex molds adapt? Or will it require entirely new ones with built in zone controlled heat channels like in injection molds? I know, I ask too many questions.

Canoe_Codger wrote:Vacuume bagging for Twintex takes a whole different setup than the Royalex, right? Esquif supposedly overcame the cracking and delamination problems they had with Twintex early on. If I understand correctly, it is a poly/fiberglass strand matrix material. Will TBC Royalex molds adapt? Or will it require entirely new ones with built in zone controlled heat channels like in injection molds? I know, I ask too many questions.

We probably won't try the twin-tex I imagine. The company would sell it to us though. From my limited understanding the material needs to be vacuumed bag molded with a resin and held in shape ie mold then baked in a large oven at high temp. We built our oven to hold three sheets of royalex at a time but not a canoe mold. Our alternatives would to make hard plastic two piece kayaks or low end thermoformed polyethylene canoes like what you see at sams or Walmart. I also have some ideas floating around in my head about a low end hybrid solo poly boat.

I like those contoured wood seats! From Ed's right? We have had a couple sets of those.

TBC wrote:I like those contoured wood seats! From Ed's right? We have had a couple sets of those.

Yes, they are Ed's. I would have bought from you but I found all of the outfitting supplies I needed in one store online in Wisconsin and got killer flat rate shipping. We'll see how well the contoured seat fits my contours tomorrow.

And the Wenonah drop plates were a disappointment. Not initially, but when I took them to a local fabricator to have them sheared to height, they told me that they could have made me two of them in stainless for what I gave for one of these in aluminum. Live and learn.