Pultruded fiberglass/composites??

[mrbaseballny]

Is there anyone that supplies pultruded fiberglass/composites that can be used for boat building?? OR can a rig be setup to build your own?? I am a real hardcore DIY'er, but if I can buy it I will:)

I'm looking for a light but strong material to use for reinforcement of certain areas as well as to possibly use for the tied in transom on a fiberglass bass boat.

Thanks for any help

[Karsten]

I wouldn't try to make my own. Research the production method and you will find out that you need some pretty big machinary.

There is nothing stopping you from using pultruded profiles for boat building. Usually the fibres run mainly in one direction. Therefore they would be ideal for beam cappings and stuff like that.

[mrbaseballny]

Is there anywhere I can buy pultruded sheets, etc?

[yokebutt]

A bit of general advice here. Many pultruders use silicone release agents, wich permanently degrades bondability of the finished product. You may be able to sand/scrape/blast away 99.9% of it, but the remainder will still reduce bonding-strength substantially.

Yoke.

[mrbaseballny]

There is nothing stopping you from using pultruded profiles for boat building. Usually the fibres run mainly in one direction. Therefore they would be ideal for beam cappings and stuff like that.

Can you elaborate a little on this statement?? You say that there is nothing stopping me from using pultruded profiles, what did you mean by this?

[Karsten]

If the fibres run mainly in one direction the part is very strong in that particular direction and weaker in all the others. Therefore they are good if the forces also mainly run in one direction which is the case in beam cappings. If you want to build a tophat beam you could just laminate a flat bar on top of the former instead of many layers of unidirectional tapes.

Since the plastic profiles also don't rust they would be good for all sorts of things. You could just cut down a pultruded ladder electricians use and screw it to your transom as a bathing ladder.