What scared me away is being able to
see daylight through the thin f'glass on the hull.


"Capt." Rob wrote
I can see daylight through the hull of just about any glass hull,
dopey...unless she's been painted with a lot of coats of awlgrip.
You sure know boats!


Capt.Mooron wrote:
Say what???

My boat has 3/4" of handlaid mat & woven roving above the waterline. No way
you'll see daylight.

Depends on the resin, how it was laid up, and whether or not
it's painted. Fiberglass is, after all, glass. I've seen
very well made structural panels of fiberglass (holding up a
roof over an industrial plant, one that had trucks driving
over it) that were about 2" ( 5 cm) thick, and were
translucent enough to spot the sun.

OTOH a layup that has milky resin, bubbles, impurities, etc
etc, will be less clear. Then again, some types of resin are
not clear... it's important to know what you're looking at,
specifically. But just because a fiberglass panel is "too
clear" doesn't mean it's flimsy.

You'll often hear talk about how older boats are built so
thick because "they didn't know how strong fiberglass is"
which is baloney. Back in the early 1950s, when the Navy
began buying fiberglass boats, they commissioned a series of
engineering studies of the material which (as gov't
research) became public domain. Anybody who bothered to look
it up could find out exactly the properties of several
different types of laminate.

And thick isn't necessarily strong, most resin is brittle.
To make fiberglass strong, you want a very high thread/resin
ratio and tight interstitial bonding (vacuum bagging helps
with both). A very thick fiberglass layup that used a lot of
random strand (matt or chopper gun), cheap cloth or no woven
roving at all, poor bonding, poorly catalyzed resin, etc
etc, can just about fall apart if you look at it funny.

Believe it or not, laminated wood is more reliable
structure... and people who should know say it takes less
maintenance. There have been some very fancy & fast boats
built of wood laminated over foam core... seems bizarre to
me, but it works!


.... The 35s5 has less than that below the waterline.

35s5...French for Flimsy!

I thought it was French for "extra garlic on my snails, please."



BTW- 1" thick below the waterline on my Nordica.

That's so the ice floes won't cut right thru. Helps keep out
the leapord seals & narwhals, too!


Fresh Breezes- Doug King