Folding Kayaks Forum

Members who have never seen a Taimen can,t really give advice, i know i have seen one at a show but didn,t examine it in detail. At the price you paid it,s probably pretty good, for me i would leave it the same length, maybe shorten the frame a little all depending on what is involved. The military would consider this type of boat as disposable and probably a one time use in military operations as opposed to practice and training.

Thanks for the link. Obviously, the Russian kayak is not a quality built (when mounting and dismantling I always end in blood), although the concept with huge open cockpit is superb (actually it is closed deck canoe). Now I see, reading that discussion, it would probably have significant problems in salt water.

By the way, I doubt that Taimen is built for military. It is not designed to military standards, and no army will put its diversants in a metal frame boat (easily detected by radars). Wooden frame Kleppers are standard for that, and for any army the cost is not a question.

According to a gentleman I corresponded with who had a business making higher-quality PVC replacement skins for the Taimen, it was indeed made for the military, in the same plant that produced other military hardware. The Soviet, and later Russian, armies considered them to be disposable, one-use boats for assaults. The metal frame aren't a problem as the boats sit low in the water and any radar reflection would be lost in ground clutter.

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Michael Edelman
FoldingKayaks.org Webmaster

Taymen was never designed as "Military boat", especially "one-time disposable boat"!
Taymen was produced by military plant, Salyut, that produces jet engines for military planes, because some of such plants in SU were required by state to produce some "civil" production. We know lots of example of such things, some of them were strange (Titanium shovels, or "3-fuse kerosene cooker" by "Irkutsk aircraft plan", which gives nickname to it's main production, Tu-154 passenger aircraft, which also have 3 engines).

Design of Taymen was done by "SU scientific/research labotatory of tourism" ("VNILTE"), which have no any relations with army, for tourism purposes with local Russian specific, optimized for long autonomous trips and expeditions and adopted to up to 2-3 class of whitewater (knees that keeps skin far from crossribs) . That successfully explains Taimen difference from klepper-like predecessors (deuch RZ-85, Poland direct Klepper copy Neptun, Soviet Salyut). Taymen have paddlers situated far from each over, closer to bow and stern, and huge luggage area between them, that allows to take with you even guitar as well as all food and camping eq for weekly (2 week, three week) trip, and very small luggage areas at bow and stern. Also you don't have to repack your luggage, everything may be carried in one big bag (compare with klepper-like boats where you need to distribute it over few smaller bags which you need to put into bow and stern).

Designer of Taymen, Valentin Strogonov is still alive and writes on some Russian forums, his main interest seems to be folding sailing boats for now. Not so far he sold some Taymens of first experimental production with his signature

I never knew my kayak was a Taimen 3 until I found this forum. It was in storage for 8 years, and the canvas deck rotted away. But I love it and want to fix it. Are there any other Taimen owners still around, and any recommendations? I'm in the Salt Lake City, Utah, area.