Magical expanding Pex pipe?

So I got my awesome new Yak retrofitted with a whitewater spray deck. The moment i recieved it back in the mail, I immediately drove to the West Table put-in on the Snake and bombed down the whitewater section at 12k. While i am not and have never been a hard shell kayaker (i occasionally row a whitewater dory) I somehow managed not to flip and was extremely pleased with my new craft.

The very next time I used it just a couple days later, I took it down to the Hoback, blew it up, and attempted to put the tent pole sections together. I could not even come close to getting them together. I checked and re-checked I was doing everything right and so did my friend. The sharkbite pipe seemed to be about 4 inches too long. When we finally did get them together, they wouldn’t even come close to zipping in; we would have ruined the zippers. With little choice other than not boating, I grabbed my river knife off my life jacket and cut about 3.5" off one of them. Problem solved.

Since then, I have taken it out another half- dozen or so times and most of the time they seem to fit tight; sometimes they feel just a touch loose (though adding 4 inches would definitely be too long.) The day they expanded they were sitting in my rocket box on top of the car on a semi- hot day… could the heat have caused them to expand?

You can try flexing the first tent pole piece while it is installed to help fit in the final pole, before zipping them up in . If that still doesnt work, you can do what I did and hacksaw a couple inches off one of the flexible white poles…reread your post, looks like you did cut off an end.

The ‘tubes’ on your new deck that contain the PEX pipes are made of fabric that stretches when it gets wet. Pre-wetting it, even before inflating the boat, is the best way to ensure that the pipes go in consistently.