Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#11
|
|||
|
|||
How to Choose the Right Used Boat to Fix It Up?
... But I must say that I am even more convinced not to
get involved with repairing a steel / aluminum boat after I have read your post. The learning curve and upfront investment seems to be a bit too high for me. Investment, maybe not. You can get a steel boat for a song, and aluminum for not much more. If you're already a skilled welder, then it makes sense. A few years ago, seeing a number of aluminum boats on the market, of a type that I liked a lot, at a good price, I looked into learning to weld aluminum... unfortunately aluminum is the trickiest stuff to work, not practical as a handyman project. But it's great engineering material, boats made of it can be light & strong & durable. In the early days, folk who were making boats out of the stuff seemed hesitant, and they used the same thickness of solid fibreglass as they had been using for wood before then! ... After these first boats didnt sink they got comfortable and started experimenting with different ideas. Excuse me, but this is a total myth. The idea that "early fiberglass boatbuilders didn't know how strong it was" is incorrect. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. Navy began building small utility craft out of fiberglass and commissioned exhaustive studies of the material. Many of the early boatbuilders worked on those projects and knew as much about it as any designer/builder does nowadays. ... With newer boats they seem to have got it right with hull thickness and composites/sandwhiches. Fiberglass *is* a composite. With regard to cored construction, that has always been an issue firstly of build quality, as laminating cores takes careful attention (ie skilled labor) whereas chopper gun or even "hand lay up" is much less demanding. So choice of materials & care in building produced excellent cored structures even in the middle 1960s. The 2nd part of that equation is care & maintenance. If the owner never bothered to rebed the deck fittings & let water seep into the core, then it gets screwed up. BTW for anybody who doesn't think that cored fiberglass hulls don't last, the first balsa-cored sailboat 'Red Jacket' is still sailing and still sound. wrote: Thanks for pointing out the three different periods of fiberglass boats. Seem like I should stick with either very old fiberglass boat, or very recent fiberglass boat. Well, you should start out by doing some field work. Join a crew and do a lot of sailing. Trudge around to the sailing clubs and work at getting rides on as many different boats as you can. Keep a notebook to record your impressions of the different boats. According to other people, I probably should focus on boat that are before the first oil crisis, and that will be before 1973. Well, there is a slight amount of truth to that, mostly due to speed of production as much as anything else. But a lot of those old very thick hulled boats are mostly resin, which is brittle. Heavy ain't necessarily strong, despite the numerous old wives tales about the strength of 2" or 6" or whatever thick fiberglass in the old pre-Nixon boats. A lot of what's said around the docks on this subject is old wives tales and utter nonsense. ... I am hoping that I can find a good solid fiberboat that needs some fixing and doesn't cost a lot of money Be darn sure you don't under estimate the cost of fixing. Spend some time with the various marine catalogs and price things like running rigging, wiring, marine paints, etc etc. Fresh Breezes- Doug King |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
rec.boats.paddle sea kayaking FAQ | General | |||
Bought a Reinel 26' | ASA | |||
What's a good sail boat to buy to live on? | Cruising | |||
rec.boats.paddle sea kayaking FAQ | General | |||
Dealing with a boat fire, checking for a common cause | General |