"My shaft just snapped!" Paddle shafts and your excuses...

A Carbon strand and a human hair (the carbon black!)

Treat your paddle like the fragile shaft of tightly wound carbon fiber that it is, because the damage you cause today, might just bite you in the butt tomorrow.

Jim Terrel from Quickblade released a video this week showing just how tough their shafts are, but like anything made from composite materials, one impact with a solid surface can be enough to excessively stress the structure. Stressed carbon doesn’t lend itself well to the bending forces we exert on a paddle shaft mid-stroke, and could snap at any time, as seen here in this video!

Carbon fiber (and it’s cheaper, more flexible counterpart fiberglass) are products of some pretty insane chemistry and science. Your carbon fiber paddle is made up of carbon atoms, which are bonded together to form a filament only 5μm thick, that’s five one thousandth’s of a millimeter! Thousands, if not millions of these filaments are then woven into ‘carbon tow’, which is then woven into cloths of varying thickness and layout. This cloth is combined with resin to form a composite, which is then shaped through various methods to make your paddle shaft. Believe it or not, Thomas Edision made the very first carbon filament in 1879. Yep, the guy with the lightbulb; but it wasn’t until the late1960’s when carbon (as we know it today) became readily available thanks to the aerospace industry.

History lesson over, because what we’re trying to say here is that carbon is a very brittle substance. While it offers (almost) unmatched strength to weight ratio’s and incredible rigidity, it’s extremely susceptible to sharp impact. Even the slightest bump on a rock can start a chain of cracks through the carbon filaments, and on your next stand up paddling session, that hard stroke for a wave will end in splintered fragments of what some call ‘black gold’.

Treat your stand up paddling equipment nicely, put it in a padded paddle bag when you’re not using it, or treat it like it’s made of glass. One sharp impact can be catastrophic. Finally, your paddle shaft probably didn’t ‘just snap’ mid stroke. You banged it last week, your kids knocked it onto the garage floor, or the dog had a sneaky bite on it while your back was turned.

Check out the video to see what we mean…