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Boat Building: Basic Construction of Resin, Fiberglass, and Cores - myboat202 boatplans

Only when resin is added to the berglass and allowed to cure does one off fiberglass boat building 8th berglass shape become xed. But what does berglass get draped over or into to create the shape of a hull or any of the other parts that go into the construction of a boat?

The answer, of course, is a mold. A mold can be either female or male. The nished part fits inside a female mold or over the outside of a male mold, the choice depending upon whether the inside or outside surface of the part is intended to be the smooth, nished surface. Since the outside surface of a hull is the one we present to the world and want to have mirrorsmooth, a berglass hull one off fiberglass boat building 8th usually laminated in a female mold.

Most boats built today also have a smooth interior liner, which fits into the hull somewhat like a one off fiberglass boat building 8th bag ts inside a kitchen trash can, and into which the cabin or cockpit furniture is molded. This part, also known as a pan see the Hull Liners section on page one off fiberglass boat building 8this made in a separate berglass mold. Such knowledge will also tell you when a contemplated repair job is worth the time and money, and when it is likely to be so difficult or costly that youd be better served to give up on the boat.

Consider, for example, a boat with a foamcored hull that has been holed in a collision. You need to determine how to get to the back of the hole.

This usually means cutting away the damaged section of the outer berglass skin, or laminate, pulling out the core around the hole, repairing or replacing the inner fiberglass skin, lling the area with new core material, and nally replacing the outer laminate. If you are not familiar with fiberglass composite construction, you could spend more time than the boat is worth just trying to get it apart. This chapters aim is to avoid such problems by familiarizing you with the materials and methods of berglass one off fiberglass boat building 8th construction.

Entire books have been written on this subject. Though this chapter is only an one off fiberglass boat building 8th, it will provide sufcient background for the repairs a boatowner or small shop is likely to. Since the mold has a highly one off fiberglass boat building 8th interior surface, the hull comes out of the mold with smooth topsides that are then polished mirrorsmooth.

While the hull is still in the mold, its interior reinforcements and structures are installed. Its deck and its furniture and ttings are added as the boat moves down the production line.

A successful berglass boat enjoys a production run of dozens, hundreds, or in a few cases even thousands of copies, depending on the boats size and popularity.

Building a plug and a mold and all the other smaller parts for a production run may cost as much as or more than building a single boat. The builder hopes to amortize the cost of the plug and mold over the production run of the model. When a berglass boat is built on a custom, or one-off, basis, the plug and mold represent costly items that are used once only to be thrown away. To avoid the need for a mold, custom berglass builders almost always laminate the hull over a male plug or forms.

This necessitates laborious fairing and polishing of the hulls exterior surface. Alternatively, a one-off large powerboat may be made in a female mold that is built from plywood and does not require building a plug. Fiberglass is laid up inside the mold and polished to a high sheen, and the boats hull is then laminated in.

Almost all production runs begin with both a plug and a mold. The photos that follow show the building of the plug and mold for one of my designs, the foot Avid powerboat. Construction details vary from one mold to the next, but this one is representative. Building a Mold Clearly the hull mold is critical to the appearance and integrity of the nished hull.

The method of building a hull mold has evolved over the decades of berglass boatbuilding, but the fundamentals have remained unchanged. The builder must rst create a male plug of the same size and shape as the One Off Fiberglass Boat Building Kit nished hull and then shape the female mold over that plug. The mold is then reinforced on the outside, removed from the plug, and polished on the 1 The plug for the foot Avid under construction.

The rst step in making the plug is to set up the station frames. These frames are cut to the shape of the hull but are smaller than the full-sized boat by the thickness of the plugs longitudinal framing and skin laminate. The Avid 24 was designed by the author.

Building a Mold 3 2 Once the frames are covered with longitudinals, the shape of the hull is clearly dened. Notice how the framing is altered around the bow area to suit the pronounced changes in curvature.

A router is then used to make each gap a consistent 2 inches 50 mm wide. Then 2-inch-wide strips the lighter-colored strips are laid into each gap to make the surface fair. The epoxy brightens the wood, highlighting the striping effect. This and successive coats will be sanded smooth to get a good nish. The mold has been split apart, and the boat will be craned out ready to be tted out with the cockpit and interior.

A bow-to-stern ange is set up along the plugs foreand-aft centerline to divide the two halves of what will be a two-part hull mold. This permits the two mold halves to be pulled sideways off the plug rather than having to be lifted vertically off the plug, as would need to be done with a onepart mold and then be mated along the ange. This is useful when overhead space is limited, and also when a boat has tumblehome in its topsides as this boat does in its stern sectionsone off fiberglass boat building 8th would prevent one off fiberglass boat building 8th hull from being removed from a single-piece mold.

The ange at the bottom of the image i. The joint will be covered with a rubrail when the boat is built. This layer will be coated with mold release wax to allow the mold to peel away easily from the plug. The coats of resin and wax are thin enough not to change the shape of the plug. The plug will then be ready for constructing the hull mold. Building a Mold 5 10 Here the hull mold is being formed over the plug.

A layer of gelcoat thick enough to prevent printthrough of the berglass cloth that will follow is rst applied over the plugs mold release wax. The interior surface of the mold must be mirrorsmooth, and the gelcoat ensures. After the gelcoat sets, a thick layer of laminate is gradually built up. The mottled color visible here is a balsa core that is being added to the mold laminate to give it more stiffness.

Here the nished hull mold is standing upright in its cradle after the two halves of the mold have been joined along the centerline ange. The curved cradle rockers permit access to the mold interior from either side simply by tipping the mold. This allows a hull to be laid up in the mold without workers having to walk around inside it.

All courtesy JWI. Molds for decks, cockpit tubs, and smaller parts are made in the same way, although usually most of the inside of a one off fiberglass boat building 8th is reachable without having to use a ladder or staging as is needed with a hull mold.

Complex shapes, such as a steering console, may be constructed in two- or three-part molds designed to allow the piece to be removed easily when formed. Forming a Hull in a Mold Having made a plug and a female mold, a boatbuilders next step is to laminate the first hull in the moldhull 1 of what the builder hopes will be a long and successful production run.

Well discuss solid-berglass hulls rst, and then look at how the laminate schedule is modied to build a hull cored with balsa, foam, or some other material. Multiple coats of mold release wax are applied to a hull mold and buffed out, creating a highly polished surface for laminating the hull.

Courtesy Ranger Boats. Making a Plug Using a Five-Axis Router Making a plug as described in the accompanying text can be a laborious job of hand one off fiberglass boat building 8th. A faster, more recently developed method is to carve the plug from a large foam-covered frame, or armature, using a computer-controlled five-axis router.

Such plugs are built off-site by specialized facilities, then shipped to the boatbuilder. The armature one off fiberglass boat building 8th usually a steel grid, since wooden armatures have been known to break into pieces when the nished plug is transported by road.

This steel frame is then covered with wood and foam to form a structure that approximates the shape of the finished plug. The outer layer of foam is sprayed in place and allowed to cure. Filler foam has been sprayed between the blocks to help glue them. The steel armature is in the middle of the yellow foam section made of foam blocks.

Pink fairing compound covers the layer of sprayed-on foam, but a little of it shows as a darker yellow than the foam blocks. This sprayed-on foam is cut by the ve-axis router, and the fairing compound is applied over the newly cut surface.

The router then goes back over the job to make a nish cut, which then receives a nal handfairing. While this part of the process is underway, a computer drawing of the finished plug is adapted to program the router. Allowances are made for the thickness of the plugs berglass outer layer and its nal fairing to ensure that the nished plug is exactly the dimensions shown on the drawings. To the right you can see a one off fiberglass boat building 8th of chips coming off the bit.

Blount Associates production facility in Norfolk, Virginia, runs for two shifts a day to keep up with the workload. These parts for a large berglass yacht show some of the complex shapes that can be molded with a computer-controlled router. Note how the steps in photo 6 are cut into the bulkhead. Courtesy D. Blount Associates. Forming a Hull in a Mold 9 Solid, Single-Skin Fiberglass Construction Solid, single-skin fiberglass construction is the one off fiberglass boat building 8th method of berglass one off fiberglass boat building 8th construction, and its still in use.

First, gelcoat is sprayed to a more-or-less uniform thickness against the molds mirror-smooth polished interior surface and allowed to set up. The gelcoat might be anywhere from 5 to 20 mils thick a mil is a thousandth of an inch but is usually at least 10 mils thick and more often 15 to 20, making it an order of magnitude thicker than a coat of paint.

Unlike a coat of paint, it is also chemically cross-linked not just mechanically adhered to the berglass laminate that follows 2 it into the mold.

When the hull is later lifted out of its mold, the gelcoat becomes the laminates outer coating and serves to protect the hull from UV degradation, scratches, and minor dings.

It is not only beautiful but also highly durable. Through the rst three decades of berglass boatbuilding, gelcoats were almost universally a pigmented polyester resin. But polyester has the drawback of allowing moisture to penetrate the gelcoat via osmosis and attack the structural laminate beneath it.

This can cause blistering see Chapters 2 and 8and after blistering began to show up in boat hulls beginning in the late s, most production builders began using a vinylester a vinyl-based polyester gelcoat in lieu of the traditional polyester gelcoator an epoxy barrier coat over a traditional polyester gelcoatthus curtailing moisture penetration.

Some buildersgenerally those building high-performance boatsnow use vinylester or epoxy throughout the hull laminate, not just in the gelcoat, but this is rare in production boatbuilding. The gelcoat is usually followed by one or more commonly two layers of chopped strand mat CSM.

Mat consists of short strands that are packed together in random orientations to form a at sheet, then held together with a binder that is resin-soluble. CSM is more easily molded than any other fiberglass material.

Boatbuilding with One-Off Fiberglass. There is no reason to build a mold. Search Advanced Search. What's new New posts New media New resources Latest activity. Mailing Address: East Park Ave. Please refer to general boat building books for details about building steps common to all methods such as strongbacks set up, bulkheads alignment, outfitting, etc. Troutcatcher , Jan 1,

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