Doug:
    The reality is that plywood is an excellent boat building material with a superb strength to weight ratio compared to the solid glass boats.... but needs to be done right, as does anything.    Foam sandwich is a difficult and expensive method for home building most boat shapes.  Few designers, probably actually none, have taken the effort to design boats that can be built easily and simply with foam infusion.   The typical home built foam core boat is going to be built of strips and planks and sheets, on or in a temporary form, sanded, and glassed on one side, then removed and sanded and glassed and finished on the other side.  Commercially built foam core boats are in my opinion poorly made due to the inability to guarantee a strong reliable bond on the "blind side" in the female mold.  Unlike Rob's infusions where an even pressure or as much as 14 psi is applied and the resin flows through the entire layup in a controlled manner, a bonding paste is used in an attempt to achieve a good bond between the foam and the glass, where the glass skin is already set up.... and of course it's polyester fiberglass, not epoxy.   I consider it a poor and unreliable process that sacrifices strength and reliability for a pretty finished skin out of a female mold.... Worse yet is end grain balsa under the waterline in combination with polyester glass.   Currently there is a large cat listed for sale for next to nothing due to large expanses of rotted balsa core.   On the other hand there are plywood boats that are as much as 50 years old that are still quite sound...... good construction and good maintenance.   They are inherently lighter and stronger than their solid glass cousins.  
    Realistically Rob's intelligent infusion process applies ONLY to a very few designs engineered for it.  If you want to use intelligent infusion, you build an HP, and if you build an HP, it's foolish to use any other construction method.  
    As for myself, I may be able to use some of the methods Rob has pioneered, and gain some advantage from his innovations, but those possibilities are greatly limited by my choice of boat designs.  My particular set of parameters automatically exclude the HPs much as I admire Robs work.  Those parameters are specific to me, and only me, and they are not subject to change.  They impose a penalty in labor / build time, and I accept that penalty.   If I find the product inferior or disappointing.... as Rob suggests, he's welcome to say "I told you so"..... though I doubt that he's the sort of man who would.

                                                               H.W.



On 09/07/2018 06:59 AM, doha720@yahoo.co.uk [harryproa] wrote: