Birth of a Legend
The story of the Old Town Clipper

With that, Lew put aside his government career and along with a friend, started a company called "Engineered Fiberglass," which built toboggans. Neither man knew much about plastics, and that, combined with distribution problems, put the company under. Out-of-work, Lew started a foreign car repair service, though he knew nothing about the machines.

"I'd have people come in with Jaguars, Alfa Romeos, all kinds of expensive cars and ask if I could balance the wheels or fix the transmission or something else. And I'd say yep. 'Ever worked on one before?' They'd ask. "Nope. But if somebody else was smart enough to make it, I sure as hell ought to be smart enough to fix it!

I lined up the front end of a Ferrari for a guy once, and I'll tell you, the way he was about that car, I would rather have operated on his wife!" Lew could have prospered in the auto repair business, but deep down, he wanted to build canoes. So in 1962, he and Paul Rivers started the first successful fiberglass canoe company in New England. Soon, they turned their attention to a spanking new canoe building material called "Royalex" and began buying custom spec hulls from Uniroyal, which they trimmed out in their own shop. Ultimately, professional differences between the partners created a rift: when the company split in 1968, Gilman went to work for Old Town.

"I remember telling the guy from Uniroyal that within five years we'd (Old Town) be selling a million dollars worth of Royalex a year. He laughed. Well, we did, and they were amazed!" IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED...

Lew Gilman: "Half the time someone's calling you crazy or telling you you can't do this or that. Then afterwards they say, 'Oh yeah, I knew you could do it.'"

For example, When Lew began work at Old Town, he had an idea that canoes could be thermo-formed faster and easier than the way Uniroyal was doing it. The industry procedure was to frame the Royalex sheet with heavy iron to keep it rigid. Then, heat was applied and the softened Royalex was forced into the right-side-up mold.

The method was time-consuming and costly, and "...a lot of dirt and dust would get in there," says Lew. "Matter of fact, the day I was there (at Uniroyal), a guy lost his cigarette lighter, and they molded a canoe around it!"

Gilman's idea was to use an upside-down mold and unsupported (no frame) Royalex sheet. The mold would come down and vacuum the Royalex into shape. This would eliminate the bulky frame and a lot of labor. When Lew asked the engineers why they couldn't heat the sheet on the shelf without framing it, they simply said "it couldn't be done," which was just the incentive he needed to perfect the process for Old Town. Says Lew: "I immediately built a little jury-rigged oven with shelves and took a small piece of Royalex and tried it. Sure enough, it worked all right."

To keep costs down, Lew built the first machine out of scrap. The frame was made from railroad track and the mold was suspended with hand-operated chain pulls. He used the chain binders they have on logging trucks to hold the mold tight, and vacuumed it with an industrial vacuum cleaner! A NEW "DISCOVERY"

Gilman was not always happy with the quality of Royalex which was supplied by Uniroyal, the nation's only manufacturer of the material. So he devised a way of outfoxing the monopoly by rotationally molding polyethylene into what he called, "high density polyethylene sandwich"--ala the "Discovery" canoe.

Lew explains that crosslinking is achieved by linking the molecules together with a peroxide additive; i.e., the plastic first melts, then crosslinks. Strangely enough, it goes from a semi-liquid back to a semi-solid, even though it gets hotter in the process. After that, it won't melt again, which means you can't repair it by conventional methods.

"I did it almost by mistake," said Lew, as he unveiled the mystery of mending the plastic. "I had another type of material that I was trying to adhere and I sent it to Hexel in California, and they came up with a very effective adhesive. So I said geez, maybe that would do polyethylene. Well, it didn't. But I knew that if you oxidize the surface of it very quickly, almost any adhesive will stick fairly well. So I just took a propane torch to it and it took a hell of a hold. Now, this method is considered a very effective way to fix both cross-linked and any other kind of polyethylene."

Then, there's the time that Lew shared his genius with the plastics industry. Says Lew: "The accepted method for building molds for thermal-forming was to use a high temperature epoxy. But they were hard to handle and had to be post-cured after each use. I found that all the heat-resistant epoxies had a lot of aluminum in them so they would take the heat. So I devised a way to use polyester by loading it with aluminum powder and thinning it with a solvent."

About a year after Lew started thermal forming, he talked to a guy from a company that made epoxies. "What kind of epoxy are you using for your molds?" he asked. "I'm not using epoxy." "Well, what are you using?" "Polyester." "But you can't do that!" Lew told him he was 5,000 canoes too late with his advice!

Incredible, isn't it? Small town boy learns to weld and temper metal in a local machine shop, then builds a $300 sandblaster for the federal government and artfully repairs expensive foreign cars he's never seen. Later, he starts two profitable businesses and gives them up to design and build canoes for Old Town canoe Company, granddaddy of them all. He single-handedly defies existing technology with his stubborn yankee belief that the impossible is both practical and profitable.

That's Lew Gilman--inventor, canoe designer, jack-of-all-trades, and real life American hero who pursued his dream and woke up smiling.