Custom Composite Kayaks

The process we use is truly unique for the Custom kayaks. This is something that has been lacking in the kayak world, but has been part of the surfing one for half a century.

The process has two distinct technical requirements.

The first is a designer who has the experience to get it right every time. After having made thousands of custom surfboard shapes, and hundreds of kayak shapes over the last three decades, Corran Addison has those skills.

The second is the technical process to make it. This took years to develop, and like with all technologies, the final process boiled down to a compromise of time, quality and price. It needed to be affordable, be possible to do within an accepted period of time from order to delivery, and have a quality that reflects the price and will have customers beaming.

Without giving away any secrets, the main advantages of our system is that we can make any shape (literally anything) one time, and we do this in a monocoque construction (no seam). The down side is that the one off moulds do not have the finish of an aluminium or fiberglass mould, and so there is some variation to finish that is not quite what you might expect from a permanent mould.

The resin extraction process is accomplished by using a combination of inflatable bladders ( and in the case of really skinny boats, stuffing foam bits into the ends to squish the fabric). After the boat is cured, the bladder is removed, and the peel ply and bagging material is pulled out of the boat. This is very hard to do, and some poor chap is literally inside the boat peeling this out of the ends (in very thin end boats we simply cannot get it all out).

The outside finish is also very rough when the mould is removed, and considerable work goes into cleaning this up, smoothing it out and then applying the finishing coats. It's really amazing how sweet these come out once finished given how they look after demoulding. However, weights are estimates due to the custom one-off nature of the process and we cannot guarantee we can hit your desired weight exactly.

Overall, what we have is a fantastic process, that delivers a truly unique, totally personalized one-off kayak in a variety of construction options that is stronger than most composite kayaks because its seamless. We're pretty excited about the whole thing.

The unfinished boat exterior after demoulding

Removing the bladder and cleaning out the inside of the boat

The same boat as the one above, after it's finished