Styrofoam based boat building

[borisdavenport]

Hi, everyone
I need a little help with building a boat with styrofoam based material.
I found some cool videos on youtube based on this topic and its time to take some serious advice on this topic.
Found that in some countries this is a serious business and this site says more about floating applications of styrofoam in industry.
I know some resins will dissolve styrofoam(don't know which resin to use) and need fiberglass coating outside to protect it from wear and tear.
I am planning to complete this as a DIY project( hope I will get some DIY mentors here). Please help me to backyard DIY for this winter.
thank you very much

 

[Scrub Puller]

I would have thought Styrofoam would be a bloody awful material for any structural application, okay for flotation and insulation.
When making ice boxes we used epoxy because polyester reacts. I understand these days that some poly and vinyl esters are compatible.
Why not use proper closed cell foam?
Cheers.

 

[thepumpguysc]

Try THE HULL TRUTH website.. great guys over there and a lot of DIY boat builders.. Good luck..

 

[alco]

Scrub, the styrofoamiss usually just a core and holds no real structural value. It's an exoskeletal design, where the resin or material used on the outside forms the rigid skeleton that provides all of the strength.

Brian

 

[Willie B]

I once knew a guy who built a plane from Styrofoam. A strange looking thing with propeller in rear, big wing in rear. He said he should have factored how long it would take to build. By the time he was finished this high performance tiny monster was too fast for him.

I briefly met another fellow, a doctor building his own plane. This was a more traditional design. He was building the fuselage frame from 1/2" black pipe. I remember seeing at the very rear of the fuselage, about ten 1/2" pipes coming together. Some had exposed threads, others didn't. A brand new Lincoln tombstone 180 buzz box had obviously burned the first rod ever for both the welder, and weldor securing this joint. It was not pretty.

He happened to be an emergency room doctor.

I never saw him again, but years later heard of him owning his own private airstrip. The plane he flew I trust was not the one he began to build.

Willie

 

[Planedriver]

If memory serves me in the early 80's I bought a 12 or 14' snark, sailboat. Keep in mind I would have been maybe 20 years old or so at that time. The snark was of some kind of thin plastic covering Styrofoam. [Think Coleman cooler here.]

It seemed every time one of my buddies and I would load it into the truck it would get heavier. We just wrote the weight change off to the beer we had in us. Finally one day we were going to take the boat out and cruise the sandbars to see the new bikini designs.

When we tried to load the boat from it's place behind the garage we decided it was too heavy. Nothing to do but drill a couple of exploratory holes in the hull and see what things looked like. You may have guessed it. The foam was full of water and was so logged with water it wouldn't drain.

After a week of the boat draining, one afternoon following copious amounts of Budweiser, we located a sawzall and the little sail boat was 2 smaller boats. After we got a good look at the inside and how the foam absorbed water I would be very reluctant to use any kind of foam other than closed cell above the waterline for emergency flotation.

 

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . .

Scrub, the styrofoamiss usually just a core and holds no real structural value.

Gotcha alco. I just can't see the point though.

Creating voids or filling them with absorbent fragile material like coolite makes no sense to me.

Cheers.

 

[td25c]

Hi, everyone
I need a little help with building a boat with styrofoam based material.
I found some cool videos on youtube based on this topic and its time to take some serious advice on this topic.
Found that in some countries this is a serious business and this site says more about floating applications of styrofoam in industry.
I know some resins will dissolve styrofoam(don't know which resin to use) and need fiberglass coating outside to protect it from wear and tear.
I am planning to complete this as a DIY project( hope I will get some DIY mentors here). Please help me to backyard DIY for this winter.
thank you very much

That's cool borisdavinport !

Thinking about similar project only building a hovercraft . Might incorporate some Styrofoam along with a wood frame ?

Just something simple we can build under $ 500.00 for the kids play around with and might learn a little while they play .

Pretty nice looking build ....
http://home.earthlink.net/~niwotian/homeprojects/hovercraftmain.html

Like the looks of this model as well .
http://www.rqriley.com/pegasus.html

Both use simple gas drive engines for power .
Chances are allot of us have the materials in inventory that have not been put together yet ?
Might just start out experimenting with a small prototype version powered of an old vacuum cleaner & see how it works out ?

Remember seeing articles & add's about them in magazines & DC comic books in the 1970's .

 

[old-iron-habit]

Some of the expanding foams are closed cell and add a lot of bouyancy. In addition they do add structural support as they make the frame rigid when filled. Be careful to not overfill and push out the seams. The come in different expansion rates. I seen a race boat at a show that was built with a expansion foam core and it ran 140 MPH with no structural issues although it had been flipped at speed in the past. Only tore the engine screens off according to the owner.

 

[td25c]

That's cool borisdavinport !

Thinking about similar project only building a hovercraft . Might incorporate some Styrofoam along with a wood frame ?

Just something simple we can build under $ 500.00 for the kids play around with and might learn a little while they play .
.

We ended up building a small model this afternoon . The boy liked it . LOL!
https://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/threads/hovercraft-model.65357/