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(Original Article by Brent Jernigan edited by Bill Pickl)
2.2 Quick And Dirty One Of A Kind Original Fiberglass Hulls
If you are looking for a quick way to make an adequately formed fiberglass hull with the minimum of trouble, I may have just the method for you. This method requires cheap scrap lauan plywood, a solid building board, clay, fiberglass cloth, SolarEZ fiberglass resin, and a sunny day. It is particularly suited to making one-off hulls and a hull of small ships such as transports, DD's and pre-dreadnoughts
Assuming you have scaled your hull form drawings, you can begin by cutting the hull forms out of lauan. Lauan is a cheap 3-ply plywood that is available from most DIY home supply stores for about $7 a 4'x8' sheet. Number each frame from stem to stern so that there will be no mix-up when it comes time to glue them to the building board. For complicated hull forms it is relatively easy to form each half of the hull separately, and then join them together later.
Once cutting is finished, take an appropriately sized building board and mark out the frame locations. If doing the entire hull at once it is easiest to mark a centerline and then mark frame locations by drawing lines perpendicular to it at the right spots. If you are constructing your hull in halves, I would suggest tracing the hull profile onto the board, as this will be necessary to ensure that the halves will properly mate up when pulled from each plug half.
Fill a cup with water and use a clean brush to wet down the surface of the building board. This will be necessary to help keep the glue bonding the frames to the board from forming too strong a bond. Run a thin bead of CA glue along the side of the frame being glued to the board. Carefully lay the frame glue side down lined up with the mark for each appropriate frame. Quickly spray the joint with CA accelerator while holding the frame perpendicular to the board with your other hand. The combination of the wet board with a glue joint set with accelerator will make for a weak joint, which is what you want for this part of the process. The frame will be held in place firmly enough for you to build up the plug, but weakly enough for you to break the plug free of the board after your hull is ready to be pulled.
Once all the frames are glued into the appropriate places comes the fun (and dirty) part. You will need to get green clay from an art supply store. Dick Blick Art Supplies carries it, as do most university bookstores with an art department. It's relatively cheap and comes in its own plastic bag. I got a about 50 pounds (enough for two small hulls or one battleship hull) for $20. If your frames are spaced closely enough, you can cut the clay into flat strips just wide enough to fit into the spaces between the frames. If your frames are set too far apart for this, you can use florists' foam to rough out the shape of the hull (it's cheap and available from (Continued on page 10)
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