Design Notes

I wanted to write a bit about the things that I learned while working on Mothball in the next few posts so I'll start with materials. Woods is a great building material, its cheap and easy to shape and is quite strong. Wood is natural carbon fiber after all. If designed and used correctly its probably nearly as strong as a composite hull and nearly the same weight. So how come no productions boats are made out of wood any more? As far as I can tell its probably mostly to do with how long it takes to build a wooden hull. If you have a mold you can create most of a composite hull in a few hours with great consistency. A good wooden hull takes much longer to build and shape and will have natural inconsistencies. So the money saved in materials cost is lost in the extra fabrication time of a wood hull. If you have a ton of time and don't have a mold then a wood hull makes a lot of sense, but if you were producing hulls commercially a wood hull simply is not practical.

Carbon fiber tubes rock. They are actually really easy to work with. Just cut, bond, reinforce the connections and you're done. Carbon tape is your friend. Kevlar is nice, but is a pain to work with. Its really hard to cut and impossible to sand, well you can sand it but it always leaves hairs. Good old fiberglass is nice for doing finish work because its much easier to sand and finish than carbon.