Skinning the Boat

Experimental Boat Build – Skinning the Boat

This page is about Skinning the boat frame, check out the main project index for the rest.

There is a YouTube video about this which shows the entire process, or scroll down for pictures and words.

I bought 6 metres of 1.5 metre wide red fleece  fabric from eBay and stapled it all over the frame with as much tension as I could:

The next stage is to soak the fleece with fibreglass resin. I’ll start with the parts of the skin that touch the frame, and then crisscross over the rest of the fabric and let the resin cure before totally covering the large panels. This will hopefully mean the fabric supports itself and doesn’t sag too much:

Once the fleece is rigid I can reinforce the inside with fibreglass mat and resin.

Here are pictures of the fleece totally saturated in resin from both sides. The boat is probably rigid enough to be used at this point, but I’ll still be adding some fibreglass mat and resin to the inside panels, as well as the cross-support, to strengthen it up a bit:

So far I’ve used 20Kg of polyester resin for the frame and fleece, the target total is 30Kg for the whole boat which seems realistic:

Here’s the inside completely reinforced in glass fibre, at this stage just over 30Kg of resin has been used. There’s quite a lot of cleanup to do of the internal surfaces:

More pictures of the whole boat:

I’ve stuck foam over some of the parts for grips/seats:

Next will be testing in actual water…