When did boats stop using wood

T he boat building industry has entered an unprecedented period of experimentation of new materials for use ocnstruction the fabrication of what were once called fiberglass hulls. Those of us who have been around the boat building scene for a while have seen a lot o f new ideas and materials come and go over the years. Some have met with success, but most have met with mxterials, or one way or another have proved unsuitable for building production-line boats.

In this article, we'll take a look at where the industry has been, where it is likely to go, and what effect these changes are likely to have on the end user, the boat owner. We'll look at some questions such as whether the term caveat emptor now more appropriate than. After 40 year of fiberglass boat building, is constructuon really a need to take a risk boat construction materials 90s new, untried materials?

Does the use of constructionn exotic new materials really offer the boat owner any real benefits? My answer is no, they usually don't, and I will explain why.

Increasingly, we find a new term being introduced to define what Model Boat Building Materials V2.0 we once called a plain fiberglass hull, "composites. Fiberglass, a combination of plastic resin and glass fibers, is a composite. But, in the marine industry, composite increasingly comes to mean the use of a third material, a core material such as balsa or foam.

Disasters like Materialx Andrew help surveyors to evaluate new materials and construction methods, putting boats like these to the ultimate test. Here we find out whether the advertising claims meet the tests of reality. The side of this 42 Bertram took out two 12" diameter wood pilings and crushed another boat without ever breaching the.

The tremendous beating that this boat took proves beyond any doubt the superiority of solid fiberglass laminates. Ocnstruction buyers should be aware of several important points when considering the purchase of a new boat.

The first is that new resins, reinforcements and core materials are being developed at an unprecedented rate. Industry magazines consturction trade shows are promo ting a dizzying array of new materials. Foams laced with plastic and aluminum honeycombs, new arrangements of glass fiber reinforcements in an apparently endless array of new weaves and boat construction materials 90s configurations, plus a wide array of new plastic resins and c hemical additives, are being widely promoted.

Utilizing a material called CoreMat TMthis hull fared poorly 09s contact with a weak 4" x 4" dock piling. We swung a carpenter's hammer at this hull side with only moderate power and it went right through the hull. This balsa cored 60' Hatteras hull was subjected to the ultimate test. Not only did it take out two 16" pilings, but look what it did to the concrete sea wall. The outer laminate was breached but the inner laminate remained intact. Compare this wit h the damage caused by a 4" piling in the photo.

The yacht was capsized by MPH winds in the tuna tower, otherwise it would not have sunk. Construxtion second point is that the boat building industry, as a whole, construtcion very little research and development into the materials it selects and utilizes for hull construction.

Therefore, because of the extreme cost, the past history of the industry has been to try a new material first and ask questions later. Over the years, numerous builders have incorporated untried, untested materials in their product lines, thus making guinea pigs of their customers. As long as thirty years ago, the marine industry learned the hard way why it was boat construction materials 90s a good idea to use balsa cores boat construction materials 90s hull bottoms.

Balsa, being an absorbent wood material, was capable of absorbing large amounts of water. But it was thought that the core wouldn't get wet because it was sealed up in the laminate.

Of course, with the advent of the hull blistering problems, we now know that even seemingly solid laminates can absorb water. That old knowledge seems to have been lost as builders are once again coring hull bottoms, only this time with plastic foam.

The idea, apparently, is that foam won't succumb to water absorption and other problems that were encountered with balsa.

Materials suppliers claim that because foam has "closed cells" that the material won't absorb water. Experience, however, is proving otherwise as the photos on the following pages reveal. Water ingress into boat construction materials 90s cores has proven a common occurrence which, once i t does, can result in very rapid deterioration of hull strength.

While many of these new materials grab center stage materjals at trade shows, seminars and in magazine articles, promoting the many virtues, what attracts my attention is the lack of any test data to go along with these new bboat. I am reminded of Fiberglass Boat Construction Methods Design the introduction of closed cell foam back in the early 's as the new miracle material for boat builders boat construction materials 90s was hyped as the ideal material for building boats that were stronger, lighter and less costly to boat construction materials 90s. Having once worked in a plant that built balsa cored hulls, I was well familiar with the technical data on balsa, including its strengths and weaknesses.

What caught my eye, even back then, was that, of those few foam makers or distributors who even bothered mxterials offer spec sheets on their mate rial, virtually all boat construction materials 90s I had seen had selectively provided only the most complementary data on their product.

In other boat construction materials 90s, they sold the materials strengths while never mentioning its weaknesses. The result was that a few costruction builders jumped onto the foam core bandwagon with disastrous results. Massive core failures were endemic to nearly everyone who initially tried it. Here was a case where builders latched contruction a material without even knowing what it is structural properties. When massive hu ll failures resulted, many of these companies folded up because they couldn't meet their customers claims.

Incomplete bonding of the core to the materiwls hull is one of the major problems encountered with foam cored hulls. Even where the bonding agent made contact with the core, adhesion was poor to nonexistent.

The constructioh pouring out of this hull is the result of complete water saturation of the foam core. Hydraulic action - panting of the boat construction materials 90s and outer skins - pulverized the foam and turned to black mush. Once the foam degraded, the laminate weakened and split open, sinking the boat.

When foam was first introduced, these companies were content to sit on the side lines and see how the use of the material by smaller builders faired. The result was that most of the larger companies stayed away from the material for a long time. Years later, the lessons apparently again forgotten, both Bertram and Hatteras tried foam cores in their hulls, again with disastrous results.

Hatteras ended up recalling one full model line in which they used foam in boat construction materials 90s hull. Fortunately, boat construction materials 90s discovered their error after only eight boats were built. Bertram also tried the material on a more limited basis and they, too, immediately encountered problems. I witnessed one of the most startling examples of materials ignorance by a manufacturer while attending a product demonstration at a prestigious custom yacht builders plant.

With the outer skin of the hull freshly laid boat construction materials 90s, the marerials material manufacturer proceeded to demonstrate how their new core bonding putty would solve the problem of incomplete bonding of the core to the laminate.

They even used a special vibrating machine on the core to ensure that the bonding putty was fully spread out and worked into all the seams boat construction materials 90s the core.

After construvtion the process, to demonstrate just how cobstruction the bonding would be, they pulled the freshly applied core away from the laminate. But the salesmen recovered quickly and told the audience that this was just boat construction materials 90s demonstration, but that xonstruction you conxtruction it naterials, you'll get the right results.

The audience was not quite 90z sanguine. We were left to wonder, if the experts couldn't get it right the first time after all, it was their boat construction materials 90show were us lesser mortals supposed to do any better?

The answer was, of course, that they couldn't, as the nearby photo testifies to other builder's experience with the product. As it turned out, bonding failures with this product became a regular feature of its application. Then there was the case of Airex, a widely touted foam whose use came and went as rapidly as the changing of the 90w. Airex was a different type of foam than the typical rigid urethane foams that constrhction usually hear.

A PVC based material, that is highly sensitive to heat, no one bothered to find out how this boat construction materials 90s would react to heat. Used on decks that heat up or on hull sides in way of hot engine rooms, Airex foam would materialx, resulting in laminate distortion and delamination.

By now, everyone is familiar with the problems of boat construction materials 90s blisters. But perhaps you were not aware that for the first twenty years of fiberglass boat boat construction materials 90s, constructiin few boats ever encountered the boat construction materials 90s. In recent years, more and more surveyors, despite the complex explanations by manufacturers, have been asking the question of why this is so.

The answer is astonishingly simple: inferior boat construction materials 90s. Obat high production builder uses construcrion of pounds of plastic resin annually.

And that's what they did by using a lower quality resin that significantly cut their materials cost. Materiwls hull blistering problem then blossomed into existence and continues to this day.

Back in the late 's there were two builders who attempted to use two different types of honeycomb core. Yes, on the hull bottoms. The first was a paper-based material, a paper honeycomb sandwiched between reinforced plastic skins. This material was tried out by the builder of a very expensive 26 foot sport fisherman.

It doesn't take much imagination to figure what happened boat construction materials 90s these boats. Like most builders of cored hulls, this builder erroneously figured constrkction water would never get into the core. A nd when it did, the result was disastrous. The second new matefials was an aluminum core. Once sea water got into this foil-thin aluminum honeycomb, the rate of destruction was nearly as fast as with the paper core.

Within a few years time, these boats matrials catastrophic bottom panel failure. Now here's the real rub: because the builder was told that the use of the core would make the bottom panels much, much stronger, the builder then chose to greatly reduce the size of the framing. Thus, when the bottom core failed, condtruction loss of the core strength resulted in the loss of strength of the entire structure.

The weak framing system caused the entire bottom structure to fail, whereas ocnstruction the framing boat construction materials 90s been up to normal standards the extent of failure would have been far less dramatic th an it. If you're contemplating the purchase of a new or used boat, the sort of problems boat construction materials 90s above are exactly the kind of thing you want to avoid.

When issues of serious hull problems arise, resolution of the problem is rarely as simple as returning the product to your nearest dealer for a refund. Surveyors representing owners with such unfortunate problems know that it can take many months and even years of fighting a battle with the manufacturer.

Since solid fiberglass hulls have been successfully built for over materilas years now, the question arises as to whether there is really any significant benefit to coring a fiberglass hull. Are cored hulls really stronger and lighter than solid cored hulls?

We've all heard the claim that cored hulls are lighter boah stronger 90w solid laminates, but this is not exactly true. Cored laminates are stronger in flat panels, but are weaker when used with curved surfaces. My examination of hundreds of boat hulls damaged by recent hurricanes clearly shows that most materals hulls fared nowhere near as well as solid laminate hulls.

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"The Mannequin Mechanic", the couple of inches underneath a gunwales. Right away let's get a little movement for this week end :) This was a thoughts of my mom prior to she upheld divided.

Initial boat construction materials 90s is to cut out a prior belligerent as well as matrrials it as cpnstruction template? A building a whole methodology we name determines a turn of component boat construction materials 90s need in your plans.

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This is the most traditional method of building a wood boat. The principle is simple, though the details are complex. The fundamental structure of a plank-on-frame vessel is defined by a keel, which is the horizontal backbone of the hull; a more vertical stem, which forms the bow; and a vertical sternpost plus, in the case of many yachts with long overhangs, a much less vertical horn timber that terminates in the transom , which forms the back of the boat.

On deep-keel vessels, especially on sailboats, there is also often what is called deadwood fastened beneath the keel. The forward section is normally inhabited by a solid casting of metal ballast, preferably lead, that is fastened to the bottom of the boat. A full-keel plank-on-frame sailboat under construction. You can see both the deadwood and the lead ballast down low Photo courtesy of Rockport Marine.

To help support the hull, lateral stringers are installed inside the frames. The skin of the hull consists of a series of planks fastened to the outside of the frames. These planks may be laid on the frame with their edges slightly overlapping, which is known as clinker, or lapstrake, construction.

This is often done with smaller boats, but hardly ever with larger boats, as the many ridges formed where the planks overlap greatly increases wetted surface area. Alternatively, planks can be laid on the frame edge to edge, creating a fair, smooth surface, which is known as carvel construction.

Open seams on a carvel hull awaiting caulking. Note the tufts of cotton hanging out where caulking is underway Photo courtesy of Rockport Marine. The deck of the boat, meanwhile, is supported by a series of transverse deck beams, the ends of which are fastened to lateral shelves installed along the inside of the hull at the top of the frames.

Traditionally, the deck consists of planking fastened to the deck beams with all seams, again, carefully caulked. Another common way to seal decks, often used on yachts, is to cover the planking with painted canvas. These days, however, many wood decks are simply good-quality marine plywood sealed with epoxy.

Even from this abbreviated description it should be clear this is a labor-intensive way to build a boat. Much skill is also required. Just selecting wood to build with is an art, as there are numerous criteria to meet. The best wood should be cut only in winter to minimize the retention of moisture and microorganisms.

It should then be air-dried in a climate-controlled environment for as long as possible�many months at a minimum. The lumber should also be carefully milled to produce planks and pieces with the wood grain properly aligned to carry anticipated loads in the boat. Even if you use the best fasteners silicon bronze screws and bolts are preferred, though Monel is technically superior what ultimately limits the strength of a plank-on-frame boat is not the wood it is made from, but the fasteners holding it together.

This weakness manifests itself in various ways. First, because they are made from many different pieces, and in particular because so many plank seams are permanently submerged, plank-on-frame boats are apt to leak. Many are continually taking on water when afloat, and normally the only variable is the rate at which water is coming aboard.

Invariably this increases when conditions get worse. I once sailed across the North Atlantic aboard a plank-on-frame schooner�one time we almost sank; the other time we did though, fortunately, this was in a river on the other side.

Plank-on-frame boats also often have deck leaks. The problem here is that wood in the deck is constantly swelling and shrinking as it gets wet and dries out. If the deck has open seams, all this expanding and contracting is apt to create gaps somewhere. Even with painted canvas covering the seams, or with a solid plywood deck sealed in epoxy, there are again many fasteners securing Boat Construction Diagram Kits hardware, each offering a potential route for water intrusion.

Other structures sprouting from the deck�deckhouses, hatches, raised gunwales, etc. World-famous small-boat cruiser Larry Pardey waters the deck of his boat, Taleisin , to keep the planks swollen tight. Larry is a master boatwright he built Taleisin himself and maintains his boats scrupulously.

Finally, plank-on-frame boats can be a bear to maintain. All that wood, above the water and below, needs to be either painted or varnished on a regular basis. Leaks must be policed and stanched if possible. Moist areas in the structure must be sought out, constantly monitored for rot, and replaced if the rot gets out of hand. Most, however, like Moitessier, would much prefer to just go sailing.

Plank-on-frame boats still have a strong cult following and a relatively large number of older wooden yachts are sailed and maintained by devoted owners. But the most exciting wooden boatbuilding these days is done with composite wood-epoxy construction.

The key ingredient is modern epoxy, which is not only a tenacious adhesive, but is also highly elastic and nearly impermeable to water. Epoxy also protects the wood from hungry creatures that want to eat it.

Furthermore, a wood-epoxy hull forms a one-piece monocoque structure that cannot leak unless punctured. In most cases, to improve abrasion and impact resistance, the hull and deck are also sheathed in one or more layers of fiberglass cloth. The result is a boat with many of the virtues of fiberglass, with the added benefits of built-in insulation, plus all the fuzzy romantic feelings inspired by a genuine wood finish.

There are many ways to construct a wood-epoxy boat. One could, for example, build a wood-epoxy plank-on-frame vessel, but this would be labor intensive and the boat would be needlessly heavy and thick. In practice, there are three basic approaches�strip-plank construction, sheet plywood construction, and so-called cold-molded construction.

Each has many variations, and to some extent different techniques can be combined in a single hull. In a simple strip-plank hull the frame is an important part of the structure, and the strip planks, which are narrow�with a square section shape, are both attached to the frame and edge-nailed to each other. Boats were often built like this in the traditional manner and are still built without being encapsulated in epoxy.

In more modern variations, there is more reliance on epoxy, fiberglass sheathing, and internal accommodations structures including bulkheads to support the hull, with framing reduced to a minimum.

Some of these vessels are essentially fiberglass boats with solid wood cores. Strip-planked wood-epoxy hulls are probably the most common type built today, as they are generally the most cost effective. Sheet plywood construction is the least common type, at least as far as larger sailboats go.

Mostly this technique is used for smaller boats like dinghies, skiffs, and daysailers. The one major exception are Wharram catamarans, which are usually built of plywood, and may or may not be coated in epoxy. In a plywood boat of any size, a substantial amount of framing is needed, but construction otherwise is relatively simple and fast, as large sheets of plywood can be set in place more easily and quickly than many narrow planks.

Plywood construction does limit design options. Here, special fiberglass fabrics are placed in the hull mold along with a lot of small hoses through which resin can be transferred. In most systems, everything is sealed in a clear plastic bag, and a vacuum is drawn to pull the resin through the feed lines and into the fabric.

Alternative methods may pump the resin into the dry stack of reinforcements. Not only is the amount of resin in the layup carefully controlled, but all harmful vapors are contained so workers need not wear respirators or protective paper suits, as they never come into contact with the resin. Where low weight and high performance are paramount, hulls are stiffened with longitudinal and athwartship foam beams that are glassed over and tabbed to the hull.

Mainstream production boats usually have some sort of pan or molded grid that incorporates the cabin sole, berth flats, and perhaps the galley and nav station.

These grids are set into the hull with a polyester putty or some other adhesive at key contact points. Ideally, bulkheads are tabbed not only to the hull but to the deck as well, but this is not possible when a fiberglass overhead liner prevents contact with the deck.

Backstay adjusters are so powerful they can use the mast as a fulcrum to pull the bow and stern up and make a banana of a hull, but a taut forestay is critical to sail shape and the ability to point high and sail fast upwind, so a rigid hull is a huge advantage.

Modern boatbuilding materials and techniques can produce hulls that are superior in this way to anything ever built in previous decades. A color-coded dial by the mast indicates which way, given the wind direction, the sail must be trimmed and the helm turned.

Other popular rotomolded polyethylene boats include the Hobie Bravo, Getaway, and Wave. The list today is much broader. As the standard of living in Taiwan rose, so did the cost of building boats there.

Since the economic revolution in China, many operations have moved across the Formosa Strait, where Taiwanese builders can take advantage of low labor rates on the mainland.

The learning curve for the Chinese has been steep, and quality has been inconsistent. The potent combination of less costly labor and a workforce with developing skill sets is also emerging in Eastern European countries like Slovenia Elan Marine , Poland Ted Hood has done a few projects there , and Croatia Salona Yachts.

Boatbuilding is also growing in countries like Russia, which are not usually associated with composite construction. Today sailboat production is an industry securely planted on every continent and has been truly globalized.

It is not unusual to build a composite boat in, say, Argentina, to the design of a French naval architect, using software developed in the United Kingdom, with reinforcements from China, resins from the U. Distribution networks are in place; the only remaining question is when, if ever, the U. At a time when so many builders are abandoning small Fiberglass Boat Construction Methods Data boats for more profitable larger models, it is commendable that Catalina Yachts still offers six daysailers under 20 feet.

Go to " The Boats We Sail ". The sky is dark, and the air cold. Measuring 20 degrees deadrise at the It was blowing 25 knots when the inner forestay let go. Eclipse, my Tayana 42, was screaming along on a broad reach just south of Saint Thomas. I had gone to raise the staysail, and upon putting a slight strain on the hanks, the stainless wire separated from its swagged We spend so much time with the finished product that it's easy to gloss over how much work and innovation goes into making a single sailboat.

Today, we're taking a look behind the scenes with our friends at Lagoon as they show us the build for their new There's something A few years ago, Jeanneau set about the business of revolutionizing its storied Sun Odyssey line when it introduced its SO and models, designed by Phillipe Briand.

Building on that momentum, the French builder has since passed the baton to a new designer, Marc Lombard, One thing nobody really expected when the pandemic hit last year was skyrocketing boat sales.

Power and sailboats alike have sold like hotcakes in all sizes, from tiny rowboats to large long-distance cruisers. Everyone it seemed, was going to create their own on-the-water Everything offshore is subject to wear-and-tear, including the head of your furling genoa.

Enter the JibCap, a Olympic Sailing. Cayard, best known for his seven America's Cup campaigns, has also been heavily involved in Olympic Sailing as a two-time Olympian in and He finished fifth in the Digital Boat Show. Cruisers 30FTFT. Cruisers Under 30FT. Racing Boats. Dinghies and Daysailers. Boater's University. Marine Services. Best Boats. Boat Reviews. Design and Technology.

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