Tony,

No. I would be much more careful with the ideas you are presenting here. If your experiment reference is to the bend test results (available on the Guillemot site), then there was no indication that glass and epoxy lowered the strength of the samples. Someone else proposed that first fiber failure of a glass layer could lead to a concentration of stress and, hence, lower the strength of something like a paddle shaft. That concept can be defended analytically, but the bend test results did not demonstrate it. Some of the recent data I have suggests that hand-laid plain weave glass results in a stiffness and failure strain pretty close to that of wood (cedar), so I really don't think it would be a problem here.

In this particular case,the desire is to keep an existing paddle but make it stronger. Chip could either add wood to the shaft, or glass and epoxy. I would suggest wrapping the shaft with unidirectional tape at a small +- angle to the shaft axis, or using braided glass sleeve. If the sleeve is sufficiently over size, the fibers will be at a small angle when the sleeve is stretched out to contact the surface. Pete's suggestion of using CEPS is certainly worth the effort.

Sam