• Building the hull

    Grant Giesbrecht • 12/17/2018 at 03:54 • 0 comments

    To decide upon a shape for the hull, I looked ships with displacement hulls and merged the elements from various hull types into something I thought would work well. I also decided that the ship's length overall would be about 1 meter. I drafted a scale drawing of the hull's profile from the side and from above, which I used as a guide when building the hull itself. I built the hull by laying fiberglass resin (which I bought from Home Depot) over fiberglass fabric, all of which was draped over a form. I made the form by gluing a heap of 2x4s together in a VERY rough hull shape. I then my 4.5" grinder to carve my wood block into a hull shape. I patched large holes with wall putty so the shape was generally smooth.

    I covered the wood form in saran wrap so the fiberglass wouldn't adhere to the wood, then I draped about four layers of fiberglass cloth, cut to shape, and resin over the form. After the fiberglass dried, I used tin snips to cut the rough edges down along the top of the hull. To add rigidity to the hull, I cut plywood bulkheads with a band saw and installed them in the hull using copious amounts of two-part epoxy. Using the wooden form to sketch the dorsal profile onto cardboard and later plywood, I made a plywood crown which I installed along the top of the hull to further reinforce the hull's shape. The crown was screwed into wooden blocks, which were themselves screwed into the side of the fiberglass hull. Bolts were pre-positioned in the wooden blocks so they would protrude through holes in the crown. These bolts are later used to mount the deck. The As a final touch, I glued strips of fabric along the top of the hull to cover the rough fiberglass edge and make a smooth transition between the fiberglass outer plating and the plywood crown. After a few coats of white paint, I had finished the hull!