Welcome to Laminates 101
How Swift Builds the Best Composite Canoes and Pack Boats
If you’ve ever wondered what’s going on inside a composite canoe or pack boat — what it’s made of, how it’s built, and why one laminate costs more than another — you’re in the right place. This page walks you through the materials and methods that go into every Swift boat, in plain language, without the engineering jargon.
The construction of a composite boat matters as much as its design. Two hulls with identical shapes can feel completely different on the water depending on how they’re built and what they’re built with. Understanding Swift’s construction will help you choose the right laminate for the kind of paddling you do.
Resin Infusion: How We Build
Every Swift boat is built using resin infusion. The hull is built from the outside in using a female mold. First, the surface finish is sprayed into the mold and allowed to cure. Then dry cloth and core materials are placed in the mold piece by piece. Once everything is positioned, the layup is sealed under vacuum pressure and resin is injected in a controlled flow pattern.
Placing the cloth dry is a significant advantage. Our laminate team can precisely position each piece of fabric and core material without the time pressure of working with wet resin. The controlled injection eliminates voids, bubbles, and delaminations while achieving a precise resin-to-cloth ratio. Every ounce of cloth and resin is weighed before infusion begins. Once the process is dialed in for a hull design, it can be repeated with remarkable consistency, boat after boat.
Infusion also allows us to mold our carbon-Kevlar gunwales as integral parts of the hull rather than separate pieces bonded on afterward, and our climate-controlled lamination room ensures optimal conditions for every layup and cure.
Surface Finish: UV Shield
Every Swift boat is finished with our proprietary UV Shield surface coating instead of traditional gelcoat. It’s less than one-fifth the thickness and weight of gelcoat, but dramatically more flexible, more UV resistant, and more abrasion resistant.
The key advantage is that UV Shield moves with the laminate when it flexes on impact, virtually eliminating the spider cracking that has always been a fact of life with gelcoat finishes. In the Algonquin Outfitters rental fleet, not a single boat finished with UV Shield has shown spider cracking, even after multiple hard seasons of rental use.
Resin Systems
The resin is the matrix that binds the cloth, the core, and the surface coating into a unified structure. Think of the cloth as the muscles and skin of the boat and the resin as the connective tissue that holds everything together and gives it life. Swift offers two options.
Vinylester-Epoxy Hybrid
STANDARD ON ALL SWIFT BOATS
A high-performance vinylester resin with epoxy properties, delivering an exceptional combination of strength, flexibility, durability, and impact resistance. It bonds beautifully with UV Shield and works in harmony with all of our advanced cloths and core materials. This is not a budget resin. It’s the real thing.
Aerospace Epoxy
AVAILABLE UPGRADE
A custom-designed, aerospace-derived epoxy tailored for Swift’s needs. It delivers meaningful improvements in impact resistance and adds years to the working life of your boat. We’re able to offer it at a reasonable price point because we’ve worked with the manufacturer to refine the epoxy for paddlesports, bypassing aerospace testing and certification.
WHY AEROSPACE EPOXY?
Our epoxy shares the performance and physical properties of resins used to build rocket boosters, wing spars, and fuselage components, with one exception: heat resistance. The next time you fly commercially and watch a 100-foot-long composite wing flex 15 feet at the tip through turbulence without a hint of damage, you’ll know your epoxy Swift boat is built for the same kind of performance and durability.
IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE
Aerospace epoxy requires specific cure conditions. We take every epoxy boat through a carefully controlled post-cure thermal cycle in a custom-designed hot room — calling it a room-sized oven is not an understatement. We precisely increase the temperature following a specific profile, hold at maximum temperature for a precise period, and then cool following an equally exact profile. This ensures every epoxy boat is fully cured and has reached optimum thermoset performance.
Core & Ribs: The Interior Skeleton
Every Swift boat has an internal skeleton of core material and ribs that gives the hull its rigidity, shape, and impact resistance. We use a low-density, thin, impact-resistant core material more commonly found in wind turbine blades and aerospace composites. It doesn’t dent or crumble like the foam cores used in many composite boats. Sandwiched between the cloth layers during layup, it becomes a fully integrated structural component through the infusion process.
Laminate Options
The specific combination of fabrics in your boat’s layup defines its weight, strength, stiffness, and feel on the water. Every layup is a sandwich: an outer layer for abrasion resistance, inner structural layers for strength and impact resistance, a core skeleton for rigidity, and an inner layer to finish the hull. Each fabric has a specific job, and the combination is what gives each laminate its distinct character.
Finish Quality & Craftsmanship
Swift boats have the highest finish quality in the industry. Because cloth is placed dry, our team can align every piece with care. Vacuum infusion then compresses the layup uniformly against the mold, producing hulls with smooth, consistent contours straight out of the mold. No heavy sanding, no filling, no reworking. The quality is built in, not corrected after the fact.
Our integrated carbon-Kevlar (CKT) gunwales are molded as part of the hull, creating a seamless transition with no visible joint or bond line. And our skilled production team can inlay custom cloth artwork and graphics directly into the laminate — part of the structure, not decals on the surface.
Our Power is in Our People
The foundation of Swift is our people. We are blessed to have attracted and grown a team of skilled, innovative, and deeply committed individuals across our design, production, and sales teams — people who are passionate about paddling and dedicated to sharing that passion with others.
They take great pride in their craft, and it shows in every boat that leaves our factory. We believe we build the highest quality and most beautiful recreational canoes, kayaks, and pack boats in the world, and that is only possible because of the people who make it happen every day. Thank you, Team Swift, for making all of this possible.
— Bill Swift
