I'm not sure about you, but I do not find this a happy making fact, so much for the recovery, and Lefsetz on Bob Seger...
I may have gone on a time or two about the whole scam of overpriced things with a marine label... So, if you're adverse to the subject maybe you should skip this post.
Anyway, I have some scraps of wood I've been keeping on deck as something of an ad hoc test bed and now that it's time to clean the decks of excess clutter it's about time to put the test to bed.
As for the results, color me kind of surprised... Some teak bits I have out (untreated and left bare) are hanging in just as you'd expect. What's surprising is that some yellow pine scraps look just as good.
On the plywood front... I have some scraps of BC exterior ply, some formply and some marine ply all untreated and left bare and unprotected from the elements. The exterior is looking a little ragged but not that much more ragged than the marine. The big surprise is that the form ply is looking awesome...
My quick reaction is that when I get around to building the Chameleon dinghy is that considering it's glassed and sealed with epoxy then painted, that the cheap exterior should hold up as well as the less than wonderful marine ply available to me down here. This saves me quite a lot of money so this is a good thing to know.
On the form ply front... this sure seems like a great material to build a bigger sharpie or scow out of. It's cheap, seems to hold up better than either exterior or marine ply, appears to have better quality control (spelled no voids) and it is a fraction of the cost of exterior or marine... What's not to like?
Just a guesstimate but I expect using formply would save a huge chunk in the overall building budget of a 40-foot sharpie or scow and seems quite apt in a boat of workboat origins.
I think I'll be building a new self-steering rudder using the formply in the very near future but more about that later...
Listening to The Pogues
So it goes...
Bruce+
2 days ago
