What’s
the story??
New
material released by Hou Canoes……
Now that you can’t make Royalex canoes
anymore, have we reached a canoe apocalypse?? What will people buy if there is
no Royalex?? The end is nigh!!! Or maybe not! Read on to see how we have saved
the day at Hou!
As a canoe manufacturer Hou was well aware that
this situation was in bound, we thought, ‘best crack on and see what could be
done’, so here is the story.
The
starting point;
Royalex was lighter than traditional
plastics and three layer plastics, it was fairly tough too, and if the worst
came to the worst you could repair it with resins, almost anywhere. The only
down side was it wasn’t quite as stiff as we would have liked in a perfect
world.
What
exactly do we want?;
So we want a material that is stiff, lightweight,
tough, wear resistant and simply repairable if needed. Oh, and it mustn’t cost
the earth!! Not much of a tall order then!? Well that’s the brief, lets go find
it.
Boffins;
It was just after this point that I got
lost to a world of very very techy people who wear white coats and talk in
languages that paddlers don’t understand! Yes, there are people out there that
fit certain stereotypes, but what I have
learnt is that they are very very very clever! So after countless months of
testing, mixed with many months of explaining the real world to the men in
white coats who don’t understand the real world, we began to formulate what the
experts say is the most up to date, highly developed three-layer material ever
used in the production of canoes.
The material we were using in its original
form had the right properties, but each property simply needed to be improved
to attempt to replace Royalex, a simple job then!!??
Result;
What we have now achieved is a significant
weight reduction, increased wear properties, increased stiffness and still maintained
the ability to repair a boat on the river bank with nothing more than a blow
torch and a knife. But how??
Without going completely into ‘white coat
speak’ it works kind of like this. Looking at your boat material down to an Atomic level (yes the white coat men
can do this), what we needed was a highly tunable ability to affect the stiffness, wear
property and weight of the material whilst it is being Rotary molded, this works down at a Nano level giving us the ability to control the characteristics of
the material while it is actually in production. Equally as important is the
ability to dial back these adjustments if required, so the Inversion ability was also added to the mix.
The story of how we got here is important,
its what makes your Hou Canoe as good as it is, the key elements of this new
material development are highlighted in bold above, the project code name was
born early from these attributes and has stayed with us all the way through, so
that’s the name we have given to our new material,
Atomic
Rotary
Nano
Inversion
…….for three layer molding.
Or for short we call it A.R.N.I.3.
Why?
Because nothing and now one is harder than
ARNI3!!
We are very proud of our ARNI3, its been an
emotional journey, what is even more impressive is that we are still able to
produce these boats and not charge a premium for them, ARNI3 is always there
for you, as standard.
“Probably the toughest, lightest, stiffest and
hardest wearing 3 layer available.”
Thanks for reading,
The Hou Crew.
