Vixen canoes

Paddledog

New Member
Just purchased a Vixen brand all wood canoe.
I can not find any info on line.
Maybe I am misreading the medallion.
They were made in Cadillac Michigan.
Does anyone have info?
 
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Post some pictures of the medallion and the canoe so the rest of us can guess too. My research has uncovered about twenty old canoe builders in Michigan but none of these were named Vixen or in Cadillac. You may also want to search Polk's Michigan State Gazetteer and Business Directory, Hendricks' Commercial Register of the United States, The Directory of the Sporting Goods Trade, and other similar documents for a reference. These are available on line from Google (https://books.google.com/), the Hathi Trust (https://babel.hathitrust.org/), the internet archive (https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php), and other sources. Please let me know if you find anything. Thanks,

Benson
 
Benson, Thanks for the response. I will look into those resources.
This is a pic of the medallion.
68279655_2419888291433082_4187314812604121088_n.jpg


This boat has been painted with at least 4 layers of paint.
After a bit of sanding, it is apparent the outside will never be returned to stain quality.
So the loose plan right now is to take it down to smooth and repaint.
 
You appear to have a molded plywood canoe and searching for "U. S. Molded Shapes" will get you lots of information. See http://www.wcha.org/forums/index.php?threads/7066/ and https://www.wagemakerwolverineboats.com/us_molded_shapes.html for more details. They also made an Algonquin canoe model. The information at http://www.michiganboatandengine.com/new-products-1/1962-us-molded-shapes-16-vixen indicates that you may have gotten a boat label on this canoe (or a canoe label might have been put on that boat). The information at http://www.fiberglassics.com/library/index.php?title=US_Molded_Shapes indicates that they only were only in business there from 1960 to 1962.

Many of these were probably painted at the factory so it would not be easy to remove all of that. Good luck with the restoration,

Benson
 
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