It’s been dropped 30 metres from a building, attacked with a sledgehammer, pummelled with boulders and flung over a cliff.

A new, tough and lightweight line of canoes developed by London’s Nova Craft is making international waves.

Videos of the canoe’s survival after a series of grimace-inducing torture tests have drawn more than 30,000 online views and attracted widespread acclaim at the line’s official launch at North America’s biggest paddling show last week.

The canoe is made of TuffStuff — a London-developed composite material with layers of basalt cloth (spun volcanic-rock fibres) and a specialized plastic called Innegra.

Canoe & Kayak Magazine called Nova Craft’s TuffStuff canoes one of the hits of last week’s Canoecopia, the annual Wisconsin show that attracted 21,000 paddling aficionados.

“We did really well at the show,” said Nova Craft president Tim Miller. “This is a pretty successful launch.”

Miller said the TuffStuff canoes are selling “like pancakes at the sugar bush,” and faster than they can be produced at the Nightingale Ave. facility in east London.

Canoecopia organizer and self-described “canoe evangelist” Darren Bush said from Wisconsin that Nova Craft was a magnet at the show, largely because of the TuffStuff innovation.

“Nova Craft killed it” in both consumer interest and sales volume, said Bush, who owns Rutabaga Paddlesports in Madison, Wis.

Videos of the unusual trials drew an enraptured, and sometimes horrified, audience at the Wisconsin event.

One video shows Miller and his staff atop their factory roof and chucking a red Prospector-style canoe to the ground. It survived, with little more than scratches.

Another video shows staffers bouncing on the upturned hull of the same canoe, which easily withstands the strain.

A Nova Craft TuffStuff canoe sent to Mountain Equipment Co-op for an independent field test was still in paddle-worthy condition after being wrapped around river boulders, tossed from a cliff, assailed with head-sized rocks and rocketed from atop a moving car.

“It’s gone viral, as viral as a paddling video can go,” Bush said. “They tried to destroy a boat and they couldn’t.”

None of that torture is covered under the manufacturer’s warranty, Miller noted.

TuffStuff is the daughter of necessity, after a lightweight, durable and easy-to-mould material called Royalex was discontinued by its U.S. manufacturer last year.

Canoe-makers across North America scrambled to replicate or replace Royalex. They included Quebec-based Esquif Canoes, which planned this month to unveil mouldable sheets of material called T-Formex — material Nova Craft and others had hoped to buy for their own processing. But Esquif abruptly ceased operations last week.

Since then, Nova has received even more orders, including fleets bought by summer camps that originally ordered Esquif models.

Nova Craft builds a variety of canoe and kayak styles from different materials, including heavier and less expensive plastic models for recreational paddlers.

The TuffStuff line is intended especially for expeditioners — it’s about 20% lighter than Royalex-material canoes.

It’s also more labour-intensive to build, and prices are about 20% higher than those made with Royalex.

But it’s also a path-maker, Bush said. “It’s kind of ironic to me that the smallest companies are the most innovative.”

Bush said they retain the solid design and good performance that are hallmarks of the Nova Craft brand. (He owns four Nova Craft canoes.) “They’re great boats. They paddle beautifully.”

To view videos of the canoe endurance trials, check out the company’s blog entries at novacraft.com and search the company’s novacraftcanoe channel on YouTube.

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