aluminum boat bottom

[pendelton]

Ok here goes
I have a question that hopefully someone can help me with. I have been working on building a 5 degree jet boat hull out of aluminum. I should say I have been thinking about doing this. Any way I build a 20' flat bottom aluminum and it turned out awesome and now I want to upgrade to a boat with a slite vee. So I have talked to a few boat builders and found one to form the bottom with the delta pad for me. However I could buy the material for the entire hull for what they charge. Does anyone know if a general type fab shop could do this or how its done. I know boat builders have jigs but I dont know how they press this material into shape. Can a person just have a fab shop put just the vee in the hull then cut and weld in the delta pad. I think this would work but it would loose alot of strength I think.

Any help would be great.

[Dean Smith]

Originally Posted by pendelton

Ok here goes
I have a question that hopefully someone can help me with. I have been working on building a 5 degree jet boat hull out of aluminum. I should say I have been thinking about doing this. Any way I build a 20' flat bottom aluminum and it turned out awesome and now I want to upgrade to a boat with a slite vee. So I have talked to a few boat builders and found one to form the bottom with the delta pad for me. However I could buy the material for the entire hull for what they charge. Does anyone know if a general type fab shop could do this or how its done. I know boat builders have jigs but I dont know how they press this material into shape. Can a person just have a fab shop put just the vee in the hull then cut and weld in the delta pad. I think this would work but it would loose alot of strength I think.

Any help would be great.

you cannot press a vee into a hull, how are you going to go up the stem? I spose you could go part way, but boats need keel bars and stem bars so you would not gain too much I should add that a 20 foot boat may have 36 ins each side of bottom, so thats one big plate and unwieldy to fold

[Dean Smith]

this is a developed bottom plate, on a 24 foot deep vee

[messabout]

Most stitch and glue designs can use aluminum instead of ply. The panel layouts will be exactly the same for aluminum or ply. With the alum. you will weld the joints rather than glue them.

The difference is that the alum will need some interior structural parts to avoid oil canning. That presumes the the alum sheet is going to be thinner than the ply might be. Check out some plans sources for stitch and glue boats such as Glen-L and others.