Alaskaman

[alaskaman]

I've found an old wooden boat that has real nice lines. My guess is that it was built between 1900 and 1920. It may have been an old schooner but all of the rigging has been long since removed. The keel has no hog at all and garber seam are perfect. What I want to do is make a mold of the hull and the deck seperately so I can build a fiberglass version of this nice old boat and then rig it single masted so I can sail it solo if I want. For the hull should the mold be made in one solid piece or should it be built in two pieces because the boat about 60' long with about 20' of beam. It's completely made of several different types of hardwood from what I can tell...oak, iron wood....etc. I was wondering if there was anyone out there who has done anything like this. I'd like to know how it went for you.

[SailDesign]

Alaskaman, it will be incredibly hard to get a good mold off an old boat. it will finish up cheaper to take the lines, make sure they are true and fair, and then build a plug for mould-making purposes.
Problems you may find with the "old boat as plug" method are:
1. Any seams will look silly on the glass hull unless they are all exactly the same cross-section, at which point they will look wrong
2. If there is any twist in the hull (not at all uncommon in dry-stored boats), then you will just be duplicating that twist.
3. You run the risk of having to chip the old hull out of the mould afterwards, which is likely to so completely ruin the mould surface that you will need to start again - except that now you have no hull to mould from...

Taking the lines is not wildly difficult, and any reasonable designer should be able to do it. There are even machines that can be used now to take out the grunt work. Starting from a fresh sheet will allow you to make sure that the lines are "just so", and save trouble later.
If she was originally rigged as a schooner, then she should go back as one, or the balance is likely (not definite, but likely) to be way off. Again, starting with drawn or computer-generated lines would allow you to look at that and tweak the underbody to suit the intended rig. Gaff-rigged schooners are tough to re-balance as Bermudan sloops

Steve