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Before laying the fiberglass down to give solid shape to the
bottom of the hull, I decided to use styrofoam to fill in the spaces
and keep the fiberglass from "sagging" betweeen the ribs while it set.
I cut styrofoam blocks the exact width to wedge into the spaces between
ribs (as seen at left) and then used a hotwire cutter dragged along the
rib (see below) to contour the styrofoam to an exact match of the rib
contour.
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As you can see at left, the final
result was fairly smooth and really brings out the shape of the hull.
Note: on a small
ship the use of styrofoam might make the ship too boyant and keep it
afloat (illegal in our hobby), but I knew this was a 40lb ship and
would easily sink this much foam!!
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The bow needed to be made of
something a little harder, so I glued blasa block into the pocket at
the fron and sanded it down to the shape we desired. Note: I would later coat the balsa with epoxy to make it harder and more bb-proof.
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For fiberglass I did something a little different (and probably not as strong, although easier) than the usual. Instead of the standard 'glass matt' typically used in fiber-glass work, I used the asphalt-coated glass matt used for roofing repairs (it was readily available at my local Lowe's). It does, however have a
larger weave/hole so I had to lay each piece overlapping the previous
piece to make it a more solid glass-matt.
The bottom edges I pulled into the windows (later cut them out) and then spread large amounts of epoxy over the hull (being sure to press the epoxy down through the mat as I spread it).
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Using the scale plans, I measured down where the waterline should be and then cut-off the fiberglss at a depth of 1" below that water-line (this is required by our rules so that it is possible to get holes below the waterline when caught by ships with downward firing sidemounts).
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I next used the hotwire cutter again (makes working with styrofoam so easy!) to cut the tops of the foam inserts so that they would slope dowward to the center of the boat and thus guide water to the water channel in the middle! |
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I next cut small pieces of the black aslphalt-coated glass mat and epoxied them into the spaces between the ribs (this was to prevent bb's from punching down into the styrofoam as they enetered the boat.. I only had to go as far back as the rib as I planned to hang the internal armor on the inside of the ribs and that would stop the bb from traveling any further into the ship).
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Lastly, I gave the whole ship a coating of primer (I planned to use WeldWood contact cement to attach the balsa sides and I was told by others that this would keep the weldwood from sticking too tighly and make it easier to remove damaged sections later).
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