Hi,

My brother and I completed the outfitting of our new solo ww boats

~ MR outrage, wood trim, mike yee outfit, gaia standard floatation bags, weight of the bare hull acc. Mad River specification 23,5 kg

~ Esquif Zephyr, wood trim, esquif outfit,voyageur float bags
weight of the bare hull acc. Esquif specification 16,8 kg

We weighed both outfitted boats, and to our surprise both have exaclely the same weight, namely little below 24 kg!

We would expect the Zephyr to be much lighter, and the outrage to be heavier. Yes, the mike yee outfitting is not as heavy as the Esquif, but this does not explain the difference of 6,7 kg of the bare hull acc. catalog data.

2 questions

1 How heavy is your outfitted outrage
2 How is your outfitted Zephyr

Can it be that Mad River now produces the outrage with much thinner royalex...

Michel

I've never weighed my Outrage, but it's very light. It's very close in weight to a Zephyr

This is speculative, but the Outrage weights might be a holdover from the Vermont days when they may have been using heavier Royalex blanks. I bought a MR Synergy at about the same time (late 90s) and while the new Royalex was a bit soft, the hull was stiff. Nowadays, people complain that new Royalex boats are not only soft, but a bit floppy. This suggests lighter Royalex blanks.

As for the Zephyr, perhaps Esquif is putting a bit more material in certain areas of the hull, to reduce damage and the attendant delays for factory-supported repair. The initial weight may be less than the current weight.

I don't think Twintex is going to be "the answer" for light, durable whitewater boats. The stuff is durable, but as with any composite construction, you can have durability but with little weight advantage, or you can have lightness but with more hull breaks. Kaz of Millbrook might be able to lay up a similar OC-1 in S-glass over Kevlar, adding just enough reinforcement to match the weight of a Zephyr, and getting a boat that is just as stiff and damn near as durable. And, much more easily repaired.

Builders often change the laminate schedule of Royalex, depending on what they might see as a particular need or weakness of a particular model. My older Outrage X is considerably heavier than my son's new Outrage. The boats are close enough in size that to account for the substantial weight difference has to come from the lay up schedule itself. One of designers at MR confirmed this. "Oh we play with Royalex schedules all the time. A little more reinforcement here, a little less there."