WET Fiberglass and Plastic Film Composite gets boat form with its own weight

Hello,

I think we can buy a big sheet of plastic polyester film and coat it with glass and polyester resin and make a 3 material composite.

When we make a rectangular STILL WET composite , we can bend the composite with touching two corners to each others and hang to a tree with a rope and other two corners are hanged to other two trees with 2 ropes and we have A TRIANGLE SHAPE WITH ROUND BOTTOM.

I think virtually you can make very small to big boat with this technique.

Mustafa Umut Sarac
Istanbul

 

Make one and show your results.

 

why ?

 

Because the only way to prove a concept is to build and test it. I think what you say will never work, but am willing to be shown wrong.

 

i am not willing to prove anything to you , you cant test everything , you cant build for test , you must previsualize it. I mean use your brain.

 

This will not work. Gonzo is right -- you need to get your hands dirty and see what is possible with the materials and then visualize.

I know I couldn't control the wet material for even a small scale part this way.

Best case I can visualize you can get "a shape". I don't think the result will be precise. Trying to get features into the shape which make "a boat" makes my head hurt to visualize. Add dealing with expensive wet fiberglass and it's my nightmare.

 

This could work, I will call it New Origami Gravity Under Tree or N.O.G.U.T. Very simply the pre wet composite matrix will need some guidance and folds and tucks to customise the form, maybe some clothes pegs to hold the folds, even better in a sandy area where some smoothed impression can hold ideal boat shapes for the running surfaces. Every home with a traditional T style clothes line out the back is nearly set to go, working times can be idealised by ambient ramp up and down of temperatures throughout the day, some battens tuned to sheerline requirements can evolve beautiful elegant forms to the process.... It is as simple as visualising a hammock hanging gracefully between a couple of palm trees with the afternoon sun setting like fire in the west while you sip a delectable cocktail complete with little umbrella as your boat sets in parallel ready to wake to a new dawn of boat construction.
J.

 

C'mon Gonzo, A triangle shape with a round bottom. Sounds perfect. Just like all the boats out there.

 

Mtumut has good entertainment value, let him toss his ideas around.

 

The idea would surely work to a degree. When the suspended and curved matrix hardened there would indeed be a curved surface that could be boat shaped, but it would need to be well controlled and the boat you ended up with might not be quite what you planned but that's a matter for experiment.
Mtumut Gonzo has a point. Your ideas are easy to test small scale, you could do it on the kitchen table with a frame.
If you just think something as a good idea you will get critisism from other people who think it is a silly idea.

 

Conical and cylindrical shapes could be done this way, but the free form nature of letting gravity do the work, seems like a crapshoot at best. Small scale tests would be easy enough and you can play with the shapes to get something close, before dropping money on materials in a full size craft.

In reality, you could just suspend damp paper, to get similar results. Cut up some sheets of copy paper and see what shapes will dangle into a boat shape. There are several taped seam builds that use this approuch. Of course, shape choices are limited, but it does work.

 

To slow the cure enough to get a sort of boat shape , epoxy would be required , which would make for very expensive testing.

In a modest size the mold or plug is not a huge portion of the overall build.

With 5000 years of smart folks creating hull shapes for specialized purposes , a boat built to save a minor mold cost would be a heck of a crap shoot.

 

Since the "form" is flexible, the laminate would be resin rich with a poor glass/resin ratio and that would be reflected in the performance and strength. Thinking out of the box is how new inventions and techniques are generated but the success/failure ratio is high. I expect this one is a fail but some useful application may exist where the above negatives don't apply. Carport or similar roof maybe?

 

These wacky ideas remind me of the method of creating a hull shape in metal using explosives and a boat-shaped hole in the ground. Probably brings out a terror-response force these days though.

 

For a small scale test, you could use muslin or other light fabric and water based glue. It would not be different than using cardboard to test if a shape is developable.