Boating, sailing

1 Comment to “If you buy a boat what would be better/easier to fabricate into seats?”

1. 

   By CB, December 14, 2009 @ 8:33 am

   Well it would obviously be better to make fiberglass seats. The question is do you have the skill set to make them? The proper way is to get a piece of styrofoam or wood that is larger than the seats you want to make. Now you shape the material so that it’s just the way you want the final seats to be. This will become the plug for your mold. You now add a resin to strengthen the surface of your plug, and when that’s finished you apply a releasing agent to the plug, a wax or some other mold release. Next step is to add a layer of just resin and allow that to cure on the surface of the plug that you want to copy. This will be the beginning of the mold that will be used to make multiple copies of the plug, but this time you’ll make them out of fiberglass and have all the necessary strength of a real seat.

   The advantage to doing it this way is that you can add glass mat or roving onto later layers of the seat to add strength to the seats. The big problem with the plexiglass is that it will always remain brittle and will probably fall apart in a year or two. If you do use the fiberglass mold technique, you also have to remember to use a layer of gelcoat as the first layer in the mold every time. The gelcoat is a layer of resin that has opaque coloring added to it. Ultra violet radiation in sunlight will always break down fiberglass resin, so the colored layer you see on the outside is to protect the resin underneath from the sun.

   By the way. The fiberglass technique described here is the same method that is used to design and build all the fiberglass boats you see as well.

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