Tag Archives: pad eyes

Close up of a soft eye pad mounted to the deck of a Bufflehead. The pad eyes Hugh Horton used on the Bufflehead deck were made wtih Twaron™ an aramid fiber. The soft pad eyes are strong yet not as likely as rigid pad eyes to catch a knuckle or a knee cap.

Make Your Own Soft Eye Pads

By Tom Pawlak — GBI Technical Advisor

If you look closely at some of the photos in the Bufflehead article, you will notice small eye pads  (also called pad eyes) in strategic locations inside and outside of Hugh Horton’s Bufflehead. Hugh makes this lightweight carbon fiber or Twaron™ reinforced nylon line eye pads for his sailing canoes.

He glues them onto the decks or inside his sailing canoes—wherever they’re needed to hold supplies in place or hold flotation inside the hull. The eye pads are easy to make and amazingly strong. Continue reading →