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pindimar
2nd December 2010, 07:19 AM
Hello canoeists

All these posts on canoes got my memory going and thinking back to a stitch & glue ply canoe that I built with the assistance of a school friend in about 1967 or so. It was a TK1 and I'm sure Avoncraft Canoe Centre was the name of the supplier and memory may be slipping after all these years but I seem to remember that the supplier was located in Mallacoota?

Can anybody remember that company and would anybody know anything of who they were etc? Stitch & glue designs at that time must have been quite new. They did seem to be English but, not sure.

Anybody remember them?

GregF

Boatmik
2nd December 2010, 12:51 PM
Avoncraft sounds like a British name.

Yap - heres the story!

The company still exists
Avoncraft, Sales of canoes, kayaks, paddles and associated equipment (http://www.avoncraft.co.uk/)
and it has been responsible for many innovations in kayak building and manufacture. See the article below.

I found the same story at a number of different places - I have no idea which is the original.


About 40 years ago a keen young paddler crossed the channel in 5 hours in a plywood kayak that he’d designed himself and built in his garden shed. At the time Percy Blandford was still selling thousands of plans for his P.B.K, wooden-framed canvas boats all around the world and Ken Littledyke was perfecting his ‘plywood and stitch’ system. Fibreglass was in its infancy and plastic for boats was just a pipe dream.

While Bob Vardy was designing and building boats at weekends and nights he was working during the day as a Flight and Structural Test Engineer for DeHaviland. When his boats won a clean sweep in the ‘News of the World British Youth Championship’ Bob decided that it was time to take his hobby more seriously and ‘give up the day job’. Avoncraft was born.

He admits the early days were a bit scary but packed with excitement. Always eager to test new ideas he built a hardskin collapsible 2-man kayak, the first of its kind. The Special Air Service ordered a number and one model, paddled by Special Forces, won the Devizes Westminster Canoe Race. Another went with Ranulf Fiennes to the Arctic and was parachuted with him into a Norwegian Glacier where it was assembled and paddled down the glacier and into the fjord.

It was the knowledge and experience, gained within the aircraft industry that gave Bob the incentive and confidence to challenge the designs and construction of kayaks at the time. He was able to combine glass composites with plywood, a technology previously used in the aircraft industry. Much of the external fuselage of the wartime fighter-bombers, the Mosquito and the Hornet, was skinned with birch plywood, a material which offered extraordinary strength. These aircraft outperformed all other military aircraft at the time. Using similar birch and mahogany laminates to form the canoe hull, it was possible, with internal glass sheathing, to form shells of incredible strength and lightweight structure.

For more than ten years this process, still often referred to as the ‘Bob Vardy Method’, was used to good effect in the manufacture of general purpose and competition kayaks, which were sold in more than 14 countries around the world. The K1 and K2 Racing craft together with Class 3 and 4 models which were later dropped from the racing scene, competed very successfully gaining many international wins, including the Liffey descent and the Devizes Westminster.

During the 70’s wood laminates became prohibitively expensive. It was then that a decision was made to move completely into the fibre glass market, with a more competitively priced product. Within a very short period, production had reached an all time record, manufacturing racing, touring, white-water kayaks and Canadian Canoes. The number of staff moved into double figures and it was a difficult keeping pace with the orders, particularly from overseas.

In the early 80’s the plastic kayak made its first appearance on the market. Bob had anticipated this innovation and within months was negotiating with Prijon, a company he was supplying, to curtail further development of fibreglass boats and market the new Prijon Blow-moulded plastic kayak. The agency was agreed and Avoncraft changed its course dramatically. Within a couple of years glass fibre manufacture had stopped and Avoncraft had moved completely from manufacture to importing and distribution. Today Avoncraft’s new modern warehouse facility is a far cry from the garden shed or the first industrial manufacturing unit dripping with gungy fibreglass residue.

I have just sent an email to the current owner of the business to see if Mr Vardy is around. It would be very interesting to see the designs for such successful plywood racing boats.

MIK

pindimar
2nd December 2010, 06:09 PM
Hi Mik

Thanks for that information, very interesting story and I wonder what the relationship of the agent at Mallacoota was to Avoncraft. If it was Mallacoota, but pretty sure that is correct. Can't think now where they used to advertise but it may have been in Australian Powerboat & Yachting perhaps? :2tsup:

GregF

Boatmik
4th December 2010, 02:12 PM
Howdy,

I received an email from Alex Tonge who is the current owner of Avoncraft in the UK
www.avoncraft.co.uk/


Hi Michael,Bob now lives in Cyprus and Canada. He hasn’t been part of Avoncraft for a number of years.

We unfortunately don’t have any details of the ply wood kayaks, plans etc, but we do have a circa 1964 model hanging in the roof.

Kind regards
Alex

Boatmik
4th December 2010, 02:21 PM
It looks like they didn't only do canoes!

From Aeromodelling (http://maxclark.me.uk/bison/bison.html)



http://maxclark.me.uk/bison/bison-Thumbnails/1.jpg (http://maxclark.me.uk/bison/bison-Pages/Image1.html)
Dad holding my first model glider, an Avoncraft Cub, built from a kit while we lived in Sunderland, around 1983. Bill Monck of the Weardale Model Gliding Association took me under his wing and taught me to fly it.

pindimar
5th December 2010, 09:24 AM
You know I don't even have a photograph of that boat now although I think a cousin on the Hacking River does and I'll be going there this afternoon so I'll see if I can borrow the picture to take a scan.

The kayak was wrecked on a truck in about 1970 on the Macquarie Pass, NSW, The driver of the truck must have been really driving too fast because the bow of the boat was just projecting out of the side of the truck about 45cm or so and the bow apparently hit a tree on a sharp bend on the Pass. Well, that was the story the student who was driving the truck gave, anyway! The rest of us had come back up the Pass in a bus so to this day I wouldn't know what really happened.

It was a standard TK1 with a length of 14' 6" stitch & glue with two upper frames fore and aft of the cockpit and apart from the cockpit coaming that was it, as far as reinforcements went, as I remember.

Anyway, I'll see if I can get that photo this afternoon.

GregF

Boatmik
5th December 2010, 01:52 PM
That would be fantastic - I'm really interested to see how a highly competitive boat of its era was put together.

I thought the TK1 was 17ft long like the K1, but it is 16ft (or metric equivalent)

The craft we paddle (http://www.brisbane.canoe.org.au/?Page=5536&MenuID=About_the_club%2F308%2F5487%2F)

MIK

pindimar
5th December 2010, 02:19 PM
Well, it could be bad memory but 14' 6" sprang out at me, but maybe I'm just wrong! Anyway, the boat was not 16ft I'd guess. Plans long gone!

Greg

pindimar
7th December 2010, 09:42 AM
Got a photograph from an aunt today showing the Avoncraft kayak in Mansion Bay at Grays Point on the Hacking River in what must have been either 1967 or 1968.

More is coming back to me as a result of seeing this photo and I can now remember that the framing consisted of inwales as well as around 1/2 inch or so solid pieces shaped to the cockpit coaming between the two upper frames (one at the fore end and one at the after end of the cockpit). I think there was also a centre frame which the deck ply was attached to? That looks like it must have been that way in this picture, anyway. There were also a couple of floor stiffeners running along the bilges.

Greg F

anewhouse
8th December 2010, 08:29 AM
That would be fantastic - I'm really interested to see how a highly competitive boat of its era was put together.

I thought the TK1 was 17ft long like the K1, but it is 16ft (or metric equivalent)

The craft we paddle (http://www.brisbane.canoe.org.au/?Page=5536&MenuID=About_the_club%2F308%2F5487%2F)

MIK

A "legal" TK1 is 15 feet or 4.572 metres.

pindimar
8th December 2010, 12:25 PM
15ft, would you know if years ago the official length was 14'6" because that really does seem to be stuck in my memory :?
GregF

anewhouse
8th December 2010, 01:28 PM
The rules for a TK1 set a maximum length and minimum width, so a 14' 6" TK1 would have been legal.

The length has been 15' for as long as I can remember. It was that in the 70s when I started paddling a TK1.

There might have been some reason for a plywood one to be made 6" shorter than the maximum allowable length. Maybe the available materials could be used more economically at that length.

chris.d
13th July 2011, 04:40 PM
Hello canoeists

All these posts on canoes got my memory going and thinking back to a stitch & glue ply canoe that I built with the assistance of a school friend in about 1967 or so. It was a TK1 and I'm sure Avoncraft Canoe Centre was the name of the supplier and memory may be slipping after all these years but I seem to remember that the supplier was located in Mallacoota?

Can anybody remember that company and would anybody know anything of who they were etc? Stitch & glue designs at that time must have been quite new. They did seem to be English but, not sure.

Anybody remember them?

GregF
Avoncraft canoe centre was at 41 boundary road Mordialloc Vic,
I have just purchased one of their canoes

pindimar
13th July 2011, 08:19 PM
Hello Chris

Thanks for that information, it's funny how the memory plays tricks, I had it fixed in my head that it was Mallacoota but at least I got the first letter right.

Do you know if their designs are recorded anywhere?

Can you show us a photo of the boat you have purchased, perchance?

Thanks for the information :2tsup::U

GregF