I guess it's my turn to join this site to learn and contribute when I am able. I'm located in northern New Hampshire with plenty of rivers and lakes nearby. I've owned and used enough boats to have opinions. I've even spent a couple of summers (a million years ago) building kayaks (Hyperform) when kevlar was just beginning to be used in hulls. Now I'm hoping to play in a canoe for daily adventures, fishing and an occasional longer trip.
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Happy Apple Cider Day! 🍎🍵
Greetings from The Great White Hills
- Thread starter Ivaduck
- Start date
Welcome to the campfire Ivaduck, pull up a stump and grab a brew.
Jim
Jim
Ivaduck, welcome to site membership! Feel free to ask any questions and to post messages, photos and videos, and to start threads, in our many forums. Please read Welcome to CanoeTripping and Site Rules! Also, please add your location to the Account Details page in your profile, which will cause it to show under your avatar, as this is a geographic sport. Many of the site's technical features are explained in Features: Help and How-To Running Thread. We look forward to your participation in our canoe community.
Welcome to the circle. I remember Hyperform from the early- into mid-'70s, don't remember how long they lasted. I don't remember ever seeing any Kevlar in any of the ones I saw, not that many. The ones I saw mostly were the kits they offered, of hull and deck where the buyer had to seam the two halves and install a seat and the rest of the outfitting. Is that what you're referring to?
Mr duck, or am I being presumptuous?
Welcome
Let’s hear, preferably see, your canoe(s).
And whereabouts in NH do you like to paddle?
I’ve always been intrigued with paddling and camping in NH, but with the ADK’s in my backyard, I guess it’s just too easy to stay within the blue line.
Welcome
Let’s hear, preferably see, your canoe(s).
And whereabouts in NH do you like to paddle?
I’ve always been intrigued with paddling and camping in NH, but with the ADK’s in my backyard, I guess it’s just too easy to stay within the blue line.
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Welcome. Hopefully you'll share some of your adventures as I always enjoy seeing places that I am unlikely to ever get around to visiting.
Thanks for the kind words, questions and suggestions. Most of my boats have been sold off by now. My brother is enjoying my Wee Lassie, the Vallaincourt Birch Bark is hanging in a Bass Pro somewhere and the rest of them have gone off to new homes for new adventures. I will post a photo of a project canoe I'll be working on while I wait for my Blacklite Phoenix to be built and delivered but that's for next week.
But I will enlighten some Hyperform info. The first time I worked for them (Tom Wilson and Sam ?) they went under the name High Performance Products, or HIPP. Tom and Sam were MIT chemistry whiz kids. HIPP was located in an old naval shipyard in Hingham MA. The buildings should have been condemned but were actually old concrete creepy places. HIPP built six models: a Lettmann solo slalom boat, a Prion slalom boat, a "touring" kayak, a downriver race kayak, a C1 closed canoe and a C2 closed double canoe. Lettmann and Prion were German designers who HIPP paid to use their designs. Kayaks and closed canoes were almost unknown in North America at that time. HIPP also imported paddles, float bags, helmets and life jackets since nothing was produced here in the states. I believe I worked there during the summer of 1970 between High School and college. I worked in the finish department seaming hulls, installing seats and embellishing decks. I also wrote the instructions for the "kits" that were just referred to.
Two years later, in a new, nicer building, I worked for a second summer after the business had been restructured as Hyperform. Now larger and expanding they had new, bigger issues. The layup department was producing mostly "seconds" with all kinds of laminating problems due to labor training and speed of production. The layup department could not keep up with the finish department and customer service was suffering. At one point employees were told there would be no more employee purchasable boats and we all watched as the balance of the unbuilt hulls were crushed into the dumpsters. Not the best for morale. Again I was hired to work in the finish department and I was placed in charge of Olympic team boats for the U.S. kayak team. At the time we were building boats from a polyester resin and what Tom and Sam called Mithril cloth, a super light glass that us laborers lovingly called Panty Cloth. The team boats were light, so light that when the boats arrived at the Augsburg Germany sight the German team was none too happy. Our boats were many pounds lighter (I wanna say 8 pounds lighter?) so they were asking the Olympic committee to require our boats to have weight added to make things fair. It was embarrassing for them also because Lettmann and Prion were the builders of the German team boats. Same boat models, different company production.
I do remember seeing the golden woven cloth in the kayak molds for the first time and working with the kevlar components to cut the hulls along the mold edge quickly at just the right time or it would take forever to grind off. And I remember a huge rotomolding machine being setup in the shop for a first attempt at rotomolding a kayak. I never did see a successful kayak leave that machine. I was a business major at that time and wrote up my experience for a project. They were gone within that same year I believe. No idea where Sam went but Tom Wilson moved to West Virginia and started Phoenix Kayaks. He sent me a set of components for a slalom boat that I build on my porch in New Hampshire, moved to Santa Barbara California and then traded for an Avon whitewater raft to take nine months to raft around the west with my girlfriend, now wife. Fun stuff.
But I will enlighten some Hyperform info. The first time I worked for them (Tom Wilson and Sam ?) they went under the name High Performance Products, or HIPP. Tom and Sam were MIT chemistry whiz kids. HIPP was located in an old naval shipyard in Hingham MA. The buildings should have been condemned but were actually old concrete creepy places. HIPP built six models: a Lettmann solo slalom boat, a Prion slalom boat, a "touring" kayak, a downriver race kayak, a C1 closed canoe and a C2 closed double canoe. Lettmann and Prion were German designers who HIPP paid to use their designs. Kayaks and closed canoes were almost unknown in North America at that time. HIPP also imported paddles, float bags, helmets and life jackets since nothing was produced here in the states. I believe I worked there during the summer of 1970 between High School and college. I worked in the finish department seaming hulls, installing seats and embellishing decks. I also wrote the instructions for the "kits" that were just referred to.
Two years later, in a new, nicer building, I worked for a second summer after the business had been restructured as Hyperform. Now larger and expanding they had new, bigger issues. The layup department was producing mostly "seconds" with all kinds of laminating problems due to labor training and speed of production. The layup department could not keep up with the finish department and customer service was suffering. At one point employees were told there would be no more employee purchasable boats and we all watched as the balance of the unbuilt hulls were crushed into the dumpsters. Not the best for morale. Again I was hired to work in the finish department and I was placed in charge of Olympic team boats for the U.S. kayak team. At the time we were building boats from a polyester resin and what Tom and Sam called Mithril cloth, a super light glass that us laborers lovingly called Panty Cloth. The team boats were light, so light that when the boats arrived at the Augsburg Germany sight the German team was none too happy. Our boats were many pounds lighter (I wanna say 8 pounds lighter?) so they were asking the Olympic committee to require our boats to have weight added to make things fair. It was embarrassing for them also because Lettmann and Prion were the builders of the German team boats. Same boat models, different company production.
I do remember seeing the golden woven cloth in the kayak molds for the first time and working with the kevlar components to cut the hulls along the mold edge quickly at just the right time or it would take forever to grind off. And I remember a huge rotomolding machine being setup in the shop for a first attempt at rotomolding a kayak. I never did see a successful kayak leave that machine. I was a business major at that time and wrote up my experience for a project. They were gone within that same year I believe. No idea where Sam went but Tom Wilson moved to West Virginia and started Phoenix Kayaks. He sent me a set of components for a slalom boat that I build on my porch in New Hampshire, moved to Santa Barbara California and then traded for an Avon whitewater raft to take nine months to raft around the west with my girlfriend, now wife. Fun stuff.
