Easton Technical Products


Easton Technical Products Inc. is the world's premier performance alloy tubing manufacturer. Famous for both producing high performance parts and backing them up with integrity. Easton was incorporated in 1953 and initially designed and developed high performance arrows for the archery industry. Over the years Easton developed a proprietary manufacturing process that allowed them to produce precision tubing from some of the toughest aluminum alloys available. Alloys that had previously been impossible to work into tubes were now routinely processed into tubing for various markets including sporting goods, military and aerospace.

It is this tubing that above all else sets CORE Paddles apart from our competition.

Strength Beyond Composite


The main advantage Easton tubing provides CORE is the incredible strength available from the 7075 series base material. Not only is this tubing incredibly strong in tensile strength it is almost 300% stronger in impact. Unlike composite shafts the Easton tubing does not fail under impact load. A traditional composite shaft is pretty brittle. You can't hit it against rocks, smack it against the deck of your boat, or accidentally close the trunk on it without impacting some damage to the tubing. Even if this damage is unseen it can lead to complete failure of the shaft due to stress risers propogating in the underlying material. This is definitely not the case with the Easton shafting.

Material strength is technically measured in two manners. One is tensile load - this provides information on the amount of load a material can hold befor it starts to deform beyond what it can recover from. Two is notched izod - this is a test that measures how much impact load a material can withstand befor structural damage occurs. A high
end carbon composite shaft can provide a tensile load strength of up to 117 000 psi. A good composite glass shaft can provide a load of up to 75 000 psi. The Easton shafts will load to 115 000 psi tensile. This almost matches the carbon and is well above the glass. The notched izod test show a completely different type of strength though.

Anyone familiar with carbon composite shafting will know the inherent lack of impact strength available in the material. While very good at carrying load it is very poor at abrasion resistence or impact. A carbon shaft can develop stress fractures with as little as 10 lbs. impact. Glass is a little better but both are very unreliable in extreme impact cases. The only way to make them tougher is to add more material, which adds more weight, which decreases the performanc of the paddle. The Easton shafting can withstand impact loads well beyond what would be considered normal for paddlesports. Impact loads that would traditionally fail a composite shaft are brushed off with no perceptible damage. You may scuff or scratch the surface of the Easton shaft but you can rest assured that you will not be able to break it.

How strong are the new Easton shafts.... ? We made this video during the first summer of prototype testing. The quality isn't the greatest but it gets the point across. A typical composite shaft would easily have failed under the load but the Easton shaft went through at least 7 "bounce" tests befor we filmed this. You can see the original edit, and get some background info., on the CORE Blog. For reference I was about 200lbs. when we filmed that. Even after jumping on the shaft over and over and over and over again we didn't even bend it. It was perfectly straight, full strength and ready for more abuse. We plan on re-shooting this with a little more professionalism in the summer of 2011 but for now check it out...

   

CNC Forming / Colour Anodizing

Other advantages to the Easton tubing are its ability to be processed into complex shapes in one piece
through mandrel / die CNC bending and color anodizing to produce the brilliant final color finish. The bending process allowed us to design absolutely perfect energy transition zones through both the grip areas and the center joints of the paddles. CORE is the first company in the world to completely eliminate the center joint in the WW bent shaft paddle. This removed additional weight from the shaft but also allowed us to design a perfect flex pattern across the entire shaft. Traditional bent shafts use a ferrule in the center to hold the two halves together. This creates a stress riser in the middle of the shaft which results in a common failure area. CORE paddles have no such stress inducing joint. Energy travels through the paddle without impediment providing higher strength, better feel and lower weight.

The anodizing process provides an incredibly durable surface finish that is beyond gorgeous. Colours on the shafting are semi-translucent and deep provide a finish cosmetic that is amazing.Don't think that all of this technology is limited to WW paddles though. All of the CORE shafts have been designed to take advantage of the unique properties of the Easton tubing. We were able to design the shaft to allow for ideal flex in both WW and touring environments. This shaft has amazing snap on the water and provides a feel that is not too stiff yet perfectly powerful. All in colours that are absolutely beautiful.

Easton Production Process

Easton's processing involves six steps that result in some of the strongest thin wall alloy tubing ever produced :

  • Source the highest strength 7075 series alloy base for the input material
  • work this alloy base through a proprietary production process that forms the material into a tube
  • run the tubing through a drawing process that increases the strength and sizes the material to spec.
  • CNC bend the profiles required using a multi step computerized bending process
  • heat treat the material using a proprietary treatment process that dramatically increases the materials final strength
  • anodize the tubing to customer colour specs. using and environmentally sealed anodizing process



The above process produces a tube like no other. The finished tubing retains tolerances of .001" in precision across both
the OD ( outside diameter ) and ID ( inside diameter ). This high level of precision, in combination with the incredible strength, allowed us to design a shaft that could be manufactured closer to design spec. than any composite. By being able to design closer to final spec. we were able to reduce the amount of material required to buffer manufacturing variances.

Composite tubing is made from layers of fabric that are plyed on top of one another in a form. These layers have a tendency to move ever so slightly under molding pressure
and are notoriously difficult to layup perfectly time and time again during production. These variances cause strength fluctuations that need to be accounted for in the final part.
So composites are always over designed to accomodate for the pieces that have poor strength due to the manufacturing process. This means more weight in the final part.

By using the Easton tubing we are ensured that every shaft is the exact same as the shaft that came befor it. Where you could see a 10% fluctuation in strength on composite parts we see zero fluctuation in the Easton tubing. It is incredibly precise tubing and it is this precision that allowed CORE to CAD design to exact tolerances. By being able to design to final spec. we were able to remove all of the material that was overkill and still retain more strength than required.