Heart of Glass: Fiberglass Boats and the Men Who Built Them

By Daniel Spurr

The fascinating story of fiberglass boats and the mavericks who dreamed them. Nine out of ten sailors today own sturdy, often beautiful fiberglass craft. Fiberglass brought boating to the non-rich, but the history of that revolution has never been told. Daniel Spurr rectifies this omission with his highly readable and affectionate account of the fiberglass boat, from its earliest incarnation in World War II to the present day. In the early days, when shoestring genius was unfettered by industrial efficiency, therewere boats with tailfins, boats baked in ovens, and boats designed to be dropped from planes. The voyage from those first ugly ducklings to the graceful boats of the 1990s makes a riveting adventure of triumph and ruin. Along the way, Spurr profiles landmark designs that now set the standards in the used-boat market, and he portrays the revolution in human terms, introducing us to the vivid personalities who invented--often in their garages and rarely at a profit--the world of boating we know today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Feb 6, 2004
• ISBN: 9780071798921

Daniel Spurr

Daniel Spurr is the editor of Practical Sailor magazine and was former senior editor of Cruising World. He is the author of Steered by the Falling Stars, as well as of two instructional sailing books, and lives in Newport, Rhode Island.

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INTRODUCTION

Compared to the calendar image of an old wooden boat shop tucked at the head of a Maine cove, where the fragrant smell of fresh-cut wood, the sight of big band saws, and the soft cushioning of sawdust underfoot tease the senses, the modern boatbuilder’s shop isn’t much to look at. Usually squatting in an industrial zone, sandwiched by concrete factories and plumbing supplies, the entire structure—ceiling as well as walls—is corrugated metal over steel frames. It’s cheap real estate. Profit margins are mostly thin and the business fickle. Nobody can afford waterfront. Yet from these unromantic caverns emerge gleaming, beautiful boats.

Though much has changed since the fiberglass revolution began, some aspects of modern boatbuilding are not as far removed from the way things were done at the very beginning—in the late 1940s—as one might imagine.

Every new boat must still be designed by someone who understands how shapes move through water. The lines must still be drawn to scale on paper and then translated to a full-size plug, or form, over which a female mold can be shaped. Hulls are still built by laying up fiberglass inside the mold, and the fibers must still be wet out with resin. Once the hull has cured, the bulkheads and floors are bonded in place. Called secondary bonding, this is a common source of trouble. Secondary bonding is stronger if the hull is still green, that is, still slowly curing, even though it’s hard to the touch. By now, the hull is relatively stiff and can be lifted from the mold. The engine, wiring, and plumbing are installed. Only then, usually, is the deck fitted. Meanwhile, successive identical hulls are laid up in the mold—as many as the public wants to buy. Not exactly punched out by a cookie cutter—boatbuilding is too labor-intensive to call it that—but the idea is the same. In its broad outline, and even in many details, this procedure was the same in the 1940s as it is today. Techniques such as vacuum-bagging and resin infusion came and went and came again. What goes round, comes round with a new name.

Inside the gray hangar-like heart of the modern shop, however, there are important differences.

Today, top builders like to say their boats are engineered. Like an automobile. In more advanced shops, computers fair the hand-drawn lines. A robotic computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine may cut the plug perfectly symmetrical. The loads on stress-bearing skins are calculated with some degree of accuracy. The fibers are oriented to distribute those loads safely. For a given application, such as where the keel meets the hull, the weights and types of fabrics are chosen carefully. Excess weight is considered excess waste. The spectrum of resins that will be used to fill or wet out these fabrics are myriad: some flex more than others; some cure faster or slower. An industry traditionally dominated by self-taught individuals who picked up ideas by word of mouth and learned by trial and error, boatbuilding now regards formal education as a requisite. It takes an engineer to engineer a laminate. It takes a chemist to stir the pot of resin.

Hulls may be laid up inside plastic envelopes from which volatile organic compounds (VOCs) cannot escape. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) likes that. So do the workers, because they don’t breathe and stink of styrene, and they don’t have to wear full body suits and respirators.

Inside the envelope, a vacuum draws resin, metered from a drum, into the dry laminate, and only as much as required for optimal glass-to-resin ratios. The intent is to maximize the strength-to-weight ratios. Resin infusion is a ticklish operation. It’s all over when the resin cures or kicks. The workers watch the clock.

These builders are making boats that are lighter, stronger, and faster than anything their forebears imagined.

Boat speed is paramount—it’s on everyone’s mind. To increase speed, one can either add horsepower or cut weight; designers and builders do both. Bigger engines. Taller masts. More glass, less resin. Metal parts are replaced with ones of carbon fiber. Steering quadrants, blocks, and sheaves are made of titanium and composite plastic with lightening holes. A fast passage, sailors like to say, is a good passage.

And yet … and yet what about the hundreds of thousands of fiberglass boats built prior to the art of the engineered structure? Many if not most are still going strong. Built in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, they fill every marina, course every bay. Their hulls are of ordinary mat and woven roving, laminated with plain-vanilla polyester resin and reinforced with plywood, balsa, and oak, and laid up by hand with squeegees and rollers. It’s hard to kill a fiberglass boat, even one of questionable quality.

The timeline of fiberglass boatbuilding is a long passage of many legs on which the waypoints are the names of those who dared to buck convention, who dared to risk their careers and reputations—Herbert Muscat, Ray Greene, Taylor Winner, Carl Beetle, and John Wills, to name a few. These are men who as children made leaky boats from materials found on the beach and who, as their sophistication grew, blew up their mother’s mixing bowls trying to catalyze a new resin. No wonder their first boats were created in the family garage! No wonder that nearly every early builder suffered a devastating fire. Those first boats were crude by today’s standards, but they had no seams and did not leak. Their makers shot at them with revolvers and rifles to prove the strength of fiberglass. Repair, they exclaimed, was as easy as pie. Gradually, boat buyers overcame their skepticism of plastic and accepted the risk—first on dinghies, then on runabouts and daysailers. Americans took to the water in unprecedented numbers, effecting a fundamental change in recreation and leisure-time activities.

These waypoints along the passage, like neglected buoys, are old and weathered, some sunk.

Each has a story to tell.

CHAPTER 1

Ideas Inspired by War: 1939–1945

The story of fiberglass boatbuilding begins in the late 1930s, when the Great Depression was about to fold into the even greater miseries of World War II. The stock market crash of October 29, 1929, in which panic selling of stocks depressed the inflated value of the dollar, caused the closure of hundreds of banks and put millions of Americans out of work. Life savings were wiped out. Desperate men and women stood in bread lines.

A close friend of mine who grew up during the Depression recalled that the fathers of several of his school chums committed suicide because they couldn’t provide for their families. When my friend’s own son asked him why these despondent men didn’t go get some money, my friend answered, There simply wasn’t any.

Despite the unprecedented intervention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government, the country lapsed into a ten-year economic stupor. It is said that nothing boosts industry like a good war, and true to this aphorism, recovery would wait until Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolph Hitler, rattled its sword, annexing Austria in 1938, Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and invading Poland later that same year.

Recognizing the threat abroad, the United States embarked on a program of rearmament that ended the Depression. Even before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, full-scale preparations were begun for war against the Axis powers of Germany and Italy in Europe and against Japan in the East.

To support the war effort, steel was needed—more, in fact, than could be produced. Community drives to gather scrap metal from derelict cars, old appliances, and just about anything that wasn’t essential to daily living brought the war close to home. Steel was, of course, the required material for most navy ships. In a feat of mobilization perhaps never equaled, industrialist Henry Kaiser organized an ambitious shipbuilding program that quickly and cheaply built Liberty ships, as they were called, to supply Europe, employing thousands of men and women and consuming huge amounts of iron and steel.

The navy and coast guard, however, also needed smaller, special-purpose boats made of wood, especially minesweepers, to eliminate the risk of magnetic detonation. The building of wood pleasure boats had, of course, all but ceased. A very large number of them (Henry Hinckley of Southwest Harbor, Maine; Carl Beetle of New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Ernest Goodwin of Wareham, Massachusetts, to name just a few) obtained government contracts to build wooden boats for the coast guard and navy—mine yawls, picket boats, and tugs. These contracts gave them a way of contributing to the war effort and kept them in business until Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945, when they returned to the building of dinghies and daysailers, cabin cruisers and commuters, and sloops and yawls for their upper-class clients. Yachting was still a sport reserved mostly for the rich.

Other boatbuilders, as we shall see, served in the U.S. Navy, in many cases applying and furthering a knowledge of plastics acquired in the years leading up to the war. Some, no doubt, became acquainted with plastics for the first time via wartime occupations.

Countries at war are always looking for a technological edge, and World War II produced many significant discoveries that would later be applied to civilian uses in peacetime. Scientists in Germany developed the dreaded V1 and V2 rockets, which ushered in the jet age. The United States, under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos Science Laboratory in New Mexico, developed the atomic bomb. Less dramatic, yet nevertheless important, were the inventions of radar, magnetic recording tape, and, in an underappreciated harbinger of future shock, plastic components for the war machine. The latter would change forever the nature of boats.

Brief History of Boatbuilding Materials

Until about a century ago, all small boats were built with organic materials. (I limit this discussion to boats per se, which, according to one definition, are those watercraft small enough to be carried aboard a ship.) The ancient Egyptians used the papyrus reed to construct fishing boats on the Nile River. The Polynesians of the South Pacific used palm fronds, and natives of various cultures from Micronesia to the Americas employed the dugout canoe, comprising a felled tree hollowed out with hot coals. During the Bronze Age, animal skins were stretched taut over supple willow branches to make coracles, the type of boat in which the Irish monk Saint Brendan, according to legend, crossed the Atlantic to the New World.

In North America, indigenous peoples developed and refined the bark canoe, the largest of which is said to have been 46 feet long.

Wood timbers proved more durable than animal skins, bark, or other plant fibers. By the ninth century, Scandinavians had developed the lapstrake method of construction, in which the hull planks overlap. During the tenth century, Viking explorers journeyed to the North American continent in such vessels.

Plywood was first used in the United States to build boats in about 1918. Though plywood remains popular, its structural properties prevent it from easily forming compound curves, so hull shapes are limited.

Somewhat earlier, around 1891 in Europe and 1894 in the United States, when journalist and explorer William Wellman outfitted an expedition to the North Pole, the nonorganic material aluminum was first adapted to small-boat construction. Steel, on the other hand, was not judged practical for small boats at that time, mostly due to its weight.

And that’s where boatbuilding technology stood until plastics were perfected during the twentieth century.

From Plywood to Plastic

The search for a one-piece molded boat construction method was under way well before plastics came along. In 1868, the U.S. Naval Academy commissioned four 13-foot rowboats made of manila paper and glue. In 1874, one of these was rowed from Quebec to Cedar Keys, Florida.

In Troy, New York, about 1900, an inventor used shellac to cover layers of Kraft paper to make racing shells and canoes. The late boating journalist and industry historian Pete Smyth said they won every race they finished, but didn’t finish many.

In 1917, Henry Haskell made what naval architect William J. Deed, writing for The Rudder during World War II, called the first one-piece canoe of lightweight strong material, presumably of wood veneers. Later, his Haskelite Manufacturing Corporation would team with the Duramold Division of the Fairchild Airplane & Engine Corporation to produce in a cast iron mold, using steam injection and a pressurized rubber bag, the first piece of plywood with compound curves. The adhesive was a water-resistant phenol-formaldehyde resin and the year was 1937. It had a huge impact on the aviation industry, where many of the technological advances in marine materials originate. The United States Plywood Corporation’s molded Weldwood was made using a process similar to Duramold, called Vidal (a third trade name was known as Timm) and patented in 1942 by Eugene Vidal and L. J. Marhoeffer, to make wing tips, fuselages, ailerons, ducts, tabs, leading edges, and other parts. Indeed, the Fairchild AT-21 Gunner and the De Havilland Mosquito bombers used over Berlin were constructed entirely of wood.

United States Plywood built for the U.S. Army one-piece molded Weldwood boats, and Skaneateles Boats cooked 8-foot Hydrolite dinghies in an autoclave.

The missing link was a good waterproof adhesive. During the war, that changed quickly. Bakelite (founded by Ernest Baekelund) introduced a hot-setting phenol formaldehyde resin that was used to build ninety 12-footers, including thirty for the navy. The largest boat built using this method, as of 1946, was the 38-foot, 3-inch Temptress. Palmer Scott of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and famed powerboat racer Gar Wood of Marysville, Michigan, also were keen on laminated plywood formed in this manner.

The Penn Yan Boat Company of Penn Yan, New York, touted its composite construction method, which it used to build runabouts, canoes, and daysailers. Although the hulls were conventionally planked with cedar, they were entirely covered with proxylin-processed canvas, which Penn Yan claimed would not burn, oxidize, or rot, as would regular paint-filled canvas. A company brochure exclaimed, the finished outer shell of a Composite boat is a full eighth of an inch thick—flexible and hard as steel.

These urea-resin glues from Bakelite and Weldwood (also thermosetting, like phenol resins, but not the same), which did not require heat to cure, were viewed for a time as the answer, but although water-resistant, they were not actually waterproof. Resorcinol-formaldehyde adhesives cured at room temperature, were very water resistant, and were the first resin glues to earn a navy specification. Polyester, epoxy, and vinylester resins were not even dreams.

Molded plywood seemed destined to be the favored boatbuilding material of the postwar era. A few companies possessed the ability to make sheets 50 feet long. Others developed a technique of bonding veneers using dielectric high-frequency radiowaves to cure the glue. Just think, wrote William Deed in The Rudder, of getting away from leaky seams, putty oozing out, frequent refinishing and the unsightly seams, and visualize a one piece bottom or side. He predicted that within one year of armistice, the first molded plywood boats would be on the market for sale to an eager public.

But not everyone was so sure. None other than yacht designer L. Francis Herreshoff, for one, believed strongly that plywood would not and should not supplant conventional wood planked construction. The die, however, was already cast. Plywood was used to a great extent during and following the war, but it, too, soon gave way to plastics. Industrial laminates were growing by leaps and bounds. Trade names such as Formica, Insurok, Micarta, Synthane, Aqualite, Pheolite, Dilecto, and Lignolite had, by wartime, found their way into American homes and their owners’ consciousness. Phenolic laminates using paper or cotton fabric were common. Sometimes, asbestos fillers were used where high heat resistance was required. Electrical insulation, gears, terminal strips, and shaft bearings were being made of these new laminates. Even glass fiber laminates had found their way into high-speed electrical motors.

If all this seemed like a technological revolution, it was nothing compared to the advances made during World War II that in just a few short years would transform American industry. For its boatbuilders, that transformation would be propelled by the introduction of fiberglass.

When one refers to fiberglass boats, what is actually meant is fiberglass-reinforced plastic, or FRP. That is, fibers encased in plastic. But just what is plastic? First, it is a material capable of being molded, and second, it is an organic synthetic or processed material that is mostly thermoplastic or thermosetting polymers of high molecular weight that can be molded, cast, extruded, drawn, or laminated into objects, films, or filaments. At some stage it is fluid, becoming semirigid or rigid when set.

Plastics have not always been respected. When 1970s Dallas Cowboys star running back Duane Thomas called coach Tom Landry a plastic man, he presumably was using a vernacular derived from the popular conception of low-cost commercial goods, meaning cheap, fake, and without soul. Diamonds are quality, plastic is chintzy. Metal is real, plastic is imitation. Wood has personality, plastic is Made in Taiwan. For decades, plastic was a pejorative. Today, in concert with its improvement, its advantages are better appreciated. Plastic is infinitely moldable, high-impact types are incredibly strong, and none of them corrodes as does steel. (Plastics do, however, oxidize; ultraviolet rays from the sun are the enemy.) Few materials have revolutionized the way we live as much as plastic.

Two thousand years ago, the casein in camel’s milk was used by the Egyptians to make beads. This phosphoprotein still is an ingredient of some paints and glues. Gutta-percha, a plastic substance obtained from the latex of Malaysian sapodilla trees, was valued in that country centuries ago for its usefulness in making utensils. Shellac was refined by an Englishman named Alfred Critchlow from the rosin secreted by an insect and used as a practical molding compound.

Indeed, even modern plastics were not an invention of the twentieth century: rubber was first molded in 1820, the white crystalline organic-base melamine was invented in 1834, and polyester in 1847 (see appendix 1 for other advances).

Early Resins for Boatbuilding and the Military

If experts were predicting the emergence of molded plywood as the favored postwar boatbuilding material, they were apparently overlooking the fact that in the years immediately preceding World War II, a few small plastic boats had already been built using ethylcellulose lacquer, a water-resistant thermoplastic resin that softens when heated. Crosley Marine of Coral Gables, Florida, reportedly had begun building plastic craft as early as 1936; an article in Yachting ten years later said many of these boats are still functioning.

John Wills, a California chemist intimately involved in the development of wartime and postwar resin systems, recounted: The viscosity of ethylcellulose lacquer was adjusted to a viscosity of about that of marine varnish.

It also was about the same color as varnish and continued to dry (not cure) for several weeks. It was tough, though it shrank a lot. But it evolved into a workable material for other practical uses, once again related to the military.

About 1942, wrote Wills, "I was chief engineer and janitor for Western Plastics Corporation, an injection molder in Glendale, California. I was twenty-five years old. One day, two young men walked in the door toting a crude dinghy, which looked like it had been dragged behind a truck. For reinforcement, they used palm fronds that were carded [made into fibers], washed, and dried. These were patted onto a greased plaster male mold, one layer after another using a thick ethylcellulose lacquer as the matrix.

"Chris Christenson was the owner of Western Plastics and a real hustler-promoter who promptly contracted out the two men. Chris hired Zach Walters, a chemistry school teacher, to do research, and also a patent attorney to protect the hundred solutions and compounds, now called Chemold, that Chris claimed he had. The war was on, so at least while I was there, which was only a month, no boats of any kind were made.

Chris and I did not get along very well. He was always just barely inside the law on many things and had zero charisma with customers. That same year a small group from Cal Tech (headed by Dr. Theodore von Karman, the rocketeer) called me to Pasadena to look at a jet assist take-off device (later to be known as Aerojet Corp.’s JATO), which needed a high-impact housing capable of being dropped by parachute. I made the first unit at Western Plastics using Chemold ethylcellulose resin and osnaberg cloth (originally produced for coffee bean bags). The Marine Corps completed the tests, all in three weeks. By this time Christenson had so infuriated the Cal Tech people that they refused to do business with Western Plastics, offering me a $10,000 contract if I would leave Western Plastics and set up my own operation. This I did. Almost overnight, I met Ralph Roberts, an auto stylist of Chrysler LeBaron fame, who was on leave because of the war. We set up Wills & Roberts Plastics Manufacturing Corporation in Pasadena in late 1942 and started on the Aerojet contract making high-impact JATO housings.

A 12-foot navy wherry, built of Lamitex by Wills & Roberts Corporation in 1944, predated fiberglass construction. A version of it could be dropped from an airplane without a parachute for air-sea rescues during World War II.

Wills & Roberts made an improved formulation of Chemold and called it Lamitex. Wills had no compunctions about emulating the unpatented Chemold because, he said, Western Plastics had stolen the original formula from the two who made the palm frond boat, who in turn had used some simple high school chemistry in the public domain to make their ethylcellulose lacquer.

The Chemold Company became a division of Western Plastics and managed to procure other government contracts, including a few experimental landing craft. In 1945 Chemold and Wills & Roberts produced droppable containers for the air force for the expected invasion of Japan.

The nearest thing to a production boat Wills & Roberts had made to this time were navy wherries built for the war effort. From 1943 to the end of the war in August 1945, neither Chemold nor Wills & Roberts produced any recreational boats, but along with others, they had their all-Lamitex and Lamitex-covered wood prototypes ready for commercial production as soon as the war was over.

Wills & Roberts also built these seadome lighting buoys (lights not shown) to mark landing sites for seaplanes day or night.

Ethylcellulose was, however, helpful to the war effort. Certain forms of ethylcellulose are soluble in petroleum oils and waxes. During World War II, Dow Chemical Company and Wills & Roberts Plastics Manufacturing Corporation produced tons of a hot melt compound into which millions of military parts subject to rust, corrosion, and impact were dipped. Wills & Roberts called this product Strip-Seal and Dow called it Strip-Coat. It formed thick protective coatings that could later be stripped off like a banana peel. This product is still in use to protect tool bits, drills, saw blades, and other tools.

Anxious to capitalize on his wartime discoveries, John Wills formed another company, WilRo, to build small sailboats and runabouts. This pram dinghy and sailboat were made from the navy lighting buoy.

Another wide use for ethylcellulose was in the form of inhibitor strips for rockets such as the Bazooka and the Tiny Tim. These strips caused the rocket fuel—a solid—to burn evenly. Many of them were used for this and other applications such as cable coatings, proximity fuses, and nontoxic containers. Wills reported this resin also was used for high-impact laminates such as Lamitex (a resin based on lacquer) and Chemold.

As much as ethylcellulose and phenol resins promised, they had shortcomings—shrinkage and a tendency to distort if not adequately supported—driving chemists to find better resin systems.

Polyester to the Forefront

In the late 1930s, DuPont, American Cyanamid, Union Carbide, Celanese, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass had been working to make a practical polyester resin for fabrication. DuPont, with Carlton Ellis spearheading the effort, reportedly made the first batch, but was only able to produce it in small laboratory quantities, and possibly not even in liquid form, which is necessary for encapsulating fibers.

Unlike thermoplastics (e.g., polystyrene, polyethylene, and polyvinyl chloride), which soften when warmed and so can be reheated and reshaped time and again, polyester is a thermosetting plastic and remains hard even when warmed and so can be molded just once. Esters are a class of compounds formed by the reaction of acids and alcohol, with the elimination of water. Polyester resins are simply repeated chains or linkages of esters, arranged in a particular way, and different from, say, vinylester or other resins. Polyester requires an activator, which sets off a chain reaction among the molecules, forcing them to crosslink, and when cured, forms a tough, hard material. The phenomenon is called polymerization.

Carlton Ellis patented his polyester in 1936, but DuPont, ironically, would not be the first company to market a polyester resin. Pittsburgh Plate Glass introduced early polyester resins, called Selectron CR-38 and CR-39, but they were unreliable. Later, in 1942, American Cyanamid succeeded in leapfrogging Pittsburgh Plate Glass and DuPont to market the first commercially viable polyester—by a rather strange means. The Germans, beginning in 1939, were using, at least as a foundation, Ellis’s formulation to help build the wings of the ME-109 airplane. But they apparently had improved the manufacturing and curing processes. Unlike a coincident U.S. effort to make an all-plastic wing, the Germans used their new polyester resin to fabricate wings of laminated wood in an autoclave.

Later, during the height of the war, the Germans built 45- to 50-foot patrol boats of muslin foam sandwich and polyester. Documentary films show the British sinking these patrol boats in the English Channel and the Germans darting out to tow the disabled vessels back to the occupied coast of France for overnight repair.

By means no doubt surreptitious, British intelligence obtained the secret of Germany’s improved resin and passed it back to American industry, including American Cyanamid, which was collaborating on similar projects in the United States. The initial handling of this polyester was assigned to American Cyanamid’s Doc Griffith.

John Wills had one of the few hot-plate laboratory presses in southern California, and so assisted Griffith.

Doc Griffith, aka ‘Mr. Melamine’—the one who perfected melamine resins for American Cyanamid—was an excellent chemist, Wills wrote, but he experimented far too much in developing the perfect martini cocktail, so was demoted to field rep and assigned to American Cyanamid’s Azusa, California, plant, which was placed in an abandoned rock quarry where they were making poison gas. Since we [Wills & Roberts Plastics] were already buying a few products from their Azusa plant, I got to know Doc Griffith. Doc knew our shop well, so when this polyester resin came to him for evaluation, he needed someone who was a laminator and who had a hot-plate laminating press. He also needed a firm with a security classification.

Wills & Roberts had all of what Griffith needed. When he brought to Wills & Roberts the first small sample of polyester resin and some benzoyl peroxide catalyst, he brought along a young man who had a sample of woven glass cloth. He told Wills that he was from a new firm called Owens-Corning Fiberglas Company. This was, as best Wills remembers, late 1942 or early 1943. Doc catalyzed the resin, and Wills & Roberts saturated four or five plies of glass cloth, which were placed between waxed cauls (chrome-plated thin metal polished plates), then pressed between stops to control thickness. Because there was no edge restriction to the laminate, very low pressure was actually applied to the laminate; therefore, it would still be considered contact molding. Cure would be completed in three to five minutes at 250°F. This was Wills’s first experience with thermoset polyester resin.

The Search for Reinforcement Leads to the Invention of Fiberglass

Running concurrently with the evolution of resins was the need for a material to strengthen the resin. Because cured resins are brittle and possess little structural strength, some sort of reinforcement must be used that is both strong and easily saturated by the liquid resin. The principle is not unlike the use of rebar in concrete. Early boats used muslin, cotton, and sisal as reinforcement. Wills, as already noted, in 1942 observed the use of palm fronds to reinforce a plastic rowboat. None of these materials, however, was sufficiently stiff to create the rigidity desired in a hull exposed to repeated loadings.

In the mid-1940s, the Columbian Rope Company of Auburn, New York, promoted a boatbuilding method called Co-Ro-Lite, the rope fiber plastic, according to a magazine advertisement of the day. Panels were built in aluminum molds and heated inside an autoclave. Rope fiber was woven into a mat and then impregnated with an unspecified bonding material. The Co-Ro-Lite builder could produce hulls in two hours each, plus twenty minutes for curing! Though some industry observers saw a bright future for Co-Ro-Lite, the idea came a little too late.

Ultimately, glass fibers proved to be the reinforcing material everyone was searching for, the same material Doc Griffith and Jack Wills used in their 1942 experiments.

The story of glass fibers is largely the story of Owens-Corning Fiberglas (OCF). Originally, in the 1930s, its interest in glass fibers was to make an efficient, low-cost insulation to replace mineral wool, used in houses and even between the decks of navy ships. Another profitable application was making filters, such as the type that screens dust from forced-air furnaces.

Leading to these developments, in 1929, Germans Rosengorth and Hagen made glass fibers by spinning molten glass. Then in 1931, a bright young man named Games Slayter was hired as a consultant by Owens-Illinois to develop not insulation but glass block. At the Owens-Illinois Glass Company (which would later merge with Corning Glass), a manufacturer of milk bottles, excess glass was used to make mineral wool. During a plant inspection, Slayter noticed crude fibers hanging from the roof joists of the plant. Slayter and his research assistant, John Thomas, soon helped the company market fiberglass as a filter media.

A year later, another Owens-Illinois employee, Dale Kleist, tried dispersing the molten glass with compressed air. He and Slayter next tried steam, and the process worked so well that the company produced glass fibers for filtration and insulation that way for the next forty-two years. Finally, a viable method of producing glass fibers economically and in large volume had been developed. In less than two decades, it would revolutionize boatbuilding.

Individual glass filaments have tensile strengths ranging between 250,000 and 400,000 pounds per square inch (psi), and a modulus of elasticity (which denotes stiffness, that is, resistance to stretching) of about 10 million psi (wood rates about 1.5 million psi). By the 1980s, carbon fiber would make even these astounding numbers pale by comparison—60 million psi—but in the meantime, Fiberglas (the patented name of Owens-Corning Fiberglas [OCF]) was more than strong enough for boatbuilding.

In 1941, OCF perfected a means of heat cleaning the fibers to make them suitable for laminate applications. The company sent its sales force to every corner of the country, introducing its new product to people like John Wills, and, of course, to the military.

It presumably also found its way to Art Javes who, during World War II, was working for Vincent Bendix, founder of the Bendix Corporation, who was trying to develop a tiny submarine for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The twoman submarine was called the Toy and required the crew to wear scuba gear. It was mostly made of cold-molded plywood, but two 15-inch watertight spheres were made of fiberglass, which Javes, later a multihull designer, said, were among man’s earliest creations in fiberglass.

Plastic Wings for the Army Air Corps

With the aim of constructing its own composite airplane wings, Army Air Corps General Hap Arnold assembled a team of U.S. specialists at Wright-Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio. George Rheinfrank was the nominal head. Working with him in this sort of mini-Manhattan Project was Dr. Herbert Muscat of American Cyanamid (who had also been involved in developing a polyester resin for Pittsburgh Plate Glass), as well as chemists from DuPont and Owens-Corning.

From the start they tried using fiberglass as a reinforcement, but they encountered innumerable obstacles. Polyester required heat to cure, and would not do so in the presence of air. Therefore, sheet metal molds had to be made, then the part covered with a rubber bladder vacuum bag. In 1942, according to numerous sources, including William J. Deed, who wrote wartime articles for The Rudder, and more recently, Composite Fabrication magazine, sections of the BT-15’s fuselage were made using fiberglass and balsa core. In 1943, these first fiberglass-reinforced plastic aircraft parts actually took to the air. The wings of the AT-6 trainer were similarly constructed of fiberglass and balsa, but were not flown until 1953. Brandt Goldsworthy, an aeronautical engineer who was at the forefront of not only composite aircraft construction but automobiles and boats as well, said that six sets of AT-6 wings and six BT-13 (the BT-15 is incorrect, according to Goldsworthy) fuselages were built at Wright-Patterson. Interestingly, he said, it was not until forty years later that anybody got around to again building a primary composite structure for aircraft.

Herbert Muscat did, however, develop a method of molding plastic radomes, small hulls, and other objects using vacuum pressure to draw resin through a set of closed, mated molds. Known later as the Marco Method (for the Marco Chemical Company, which Muscat founded), in building hulls it used a male mold set upside down on the shop floor, with a large trough around the gunwale. The glass fibers were draped over the male mold, then the matching female mold was lowered on top of it. The resin was first catalyzed, then poured into the trough and drawn up toward the keel by vacuum pressure.

The AT-6 trainer was probably the first airplane with composite wings—fiberglass and polyester cured in an autoclave. It was the brainchild of George Rheinfrank and Dr. Herbert Muscat. Though it did not fly during World War II, it did shortly after. The officers’ Army Air Corps uniforms date the photo before the creation of the U.S. Air Force.

This process was not without its problems. Often, the resin would not completely saturate the fiberglass, leaving voids that later had to be filled by hand and faired with putty. And curing was imperfect—sometimes it cured, sometimes it didn’t. For critical, high-stress parts such as airplane wings, a pockmarked laminate was unacceptable.

Leo Telesmanick, who worked with fiberglass pioneers Carl Beetle and Palmer Scott, told the story of a pilot’s skepticism about Muscat’s one-piece fiberglass airplane. They say he molded an airplane body and it was ready to fly but no one would take it up because it had no rivets. So that night Muscat painted rivets onto the body and the next day the pilot took it up.

Muscat, said Goldsworthy, was quite a character. He was the guy who really pushed polyester resins onto the market. Today we hear so much of RTM (resin transfer molding) and SCRIMP (Seemann Composite Resin Transfer Molding), but the first polyester-fiberglass process—a boat hull—was built using RTM … the Marco Method.

So Muscat and other wartime scientists had use of a serviceable polyester resin. But it still required heat to cure, which meant that heated molds, air bags, or autoclaves were required, complicating production and limiting the size of fabricated parts. In short order, even those problems would be overcome, and Muscat could see it coming.

Prophecies

Still there were skeptics.

In 1945, author and boatbuilding expert Robert S. French wrote, We are eager to have things invented and we are often prone to assume that the new is necessarily an improvement. Not so long ago, a new group of materials appeared on the horizon—plastics. Now, at the risk of being considered conservative, I venture to suggest that the perfect plastic ‘is not yet.’ Wait awhile! Let the chemist stir a bit longer in his laboratory and he will have it—the absolute, ultimate material. But my postwar yacht will not have plastic rails or plastic cleats or plastic, et cetera. She will be built of oak, teak and mahogany, and will be bronze and copper fastened to last a lifetime.

To the extent that he foresaw the possibility of a perfect plastic, French was right. And it is no surprise that he disdained the prospect of plastic cleats and rails; even today there are in the woods of Maine and Washington tiny enclaves of anachronism, cultish communities where fiberglass is still a four-letter word. But it was coming, and French saw it, too. Soon, so would the world.

French also was correct that the chemists needed to stir awhile, for preceding the so-called fiberglass boats there were plastic boats, generally dinghies, that contained neither the hairlike strands of colorless glass nor any polymerized resin that poured like syrup and set up like stone. As is history’s wont, there were untold failures lost in time, wrecks pushed out the backdoor of dimly lit shops, dispirited builders with more vision than luck (or, in some cases, talent), all condemned by the misfortune of arriving too soon, laboring fruitlessly with inferior materials.

A more prophetic soothsayer than French, William J. Deed stated:

"Glass fiber laminates. Watch them. They are an important new material which has a distinct place in postwar boats. Fiberglas by Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation is doing a big job in the war as insulation on our fighting ships in wool, blanket, board, sheet, cement, cloth, tape, etc., form, as retainer mats in storage batteries and insulation on electric cable. Development costing millions of dollars since 1931 has gone into the perfection of this valuable Fiberglas, the demands of war giving it its opportunity for varied utilization.

"What interests us particularly in glass fiber laminates is the first application to aircraft construction which offers a remarkable lesson to the boatbuilding industry, suggesting a wonderful material and method for producing molded boats.

"We refer to the rear section of fuselage of the BT-15 airplane which was built and flight tested at the Army Air Forces laboratory of the Material Command at Wright Field. This fuselage proved stronger for its weight than the standard metal section. Sandwich-type construction using a balsa wood core was adopted, together with a new type of resin which requires no pressure in bonding. So a copolymer resin of low temperature thermosetting type was selected, which in combination with glass fibers requires no more pressure than is necessary to hold fibers in place.

"After impregnating the glass cloth it is laid over a male mold or mandrel, and inner and outer laminations together with the core between them were covered with a rubber blanket, made tight, and a vacuum drawn between the blanket and the mold. It was then rolled into the oven and subjected to 220°F for three hours for curing.

We believe boats can well be produced from these materials and by this method which will be of very light weight and of great strength.

In fact, a polyester-fiberglass boat already had been built, though neither Deed nor many other people in the industry knew it.

CHAPTER 2

Ray Greene and the First Polyester-Fiberglass Boat: 1942

Assigning proper credit to the people behind the first fiberglass boats is difficult for several reasons. The fiberglass boat was not a discovery per se, like Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone or Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. Rather, it evolved from experiments with various glues and reinforcing materials by many different people and companies. It is evident that a number of enterprising individuals were working simultaneously around the United States, and in other countries, to perfect plastics for boats. And precious few kept records that survive today. Indeed, the lack of written documentation is an idiosyncratic shortcoming of the boatbuilding industry. Ask the president of a company when, during the 1970s, it switched from building solid fiberglass hulls to balsa core sandwich hulls and it’s not unlikely you’ll hear, Let’s see, that would be 1973, 1974. You could ask Manny, the glass shop foreman, but he doesn’t hear so good these days.

Though the yachting periodicals of the day—Yachting and The Rudder—documented the growing industry (in particular authors Tony Boughton Cobb Jr., manager of the Reinforced Plastic Boat Division of Owens-Corning Fiberglas, and Pete Smyth, who knew about or interviewed early fiberglass boatbuilders), theirs was at best a sketchy history. Beyond these minimal written sources, there are only the memories of builders, owners, and sailors, however blurred by time, to help limn the picture.

By some accounts, the first attempt at building a polyester-fiberglass boat was made by a company in the Bronx borough of New York City. Basons Industries had a commission from the U.S. Navy to build some wherries, or small inshore boats. They made a mold of wood and laid up the first hull, but did not use wax or any other mold-release agent. Of course, the hull would not come out of the mold. After repeated efforts, they grew frustrated and dumped the whole mess into the river, where, presumably, it resides to this day.

In 1960, Cobb wrote, The earliest fiberglass boat we know about was built in 1944 by Universal Molded Products in Bristol, Virginia. It was a 14-foot skiff, still in operation many years later. Cobb referred to it in answering the question of how long a fiberglass boat could last. While admitting that the boats really hadn’t been around long enough to know with certainty, he guessed twenty to thirty years.

And there are a few other stories, none substantiated, of persons converting their wartime knowledge of plastics into boats. As noted earlier, plastic boats had been built since the late 1930s, but none had used glass fiber as the reinforcing agent. How polyester and glass fiber came together in the same hull is a case history of diligence and providence.

Ray Greene: Experimental Chemist

Born in 1913, in Brooklyn, New York, Ray Greene was the son of a Canadian chemist. When Ray was six, his father, Herman Greene, moved the family to Toledo, Ohio, to work for the Willys-Overland Company, where he was chief metallurgist and director of research. Willys, Ray recalled, doubled his salary and gave him a year to build a research facility and come up with something they wanted.

Suffering in the Midwest from hay fever, Herman Harry Greene was looking for a summer place up north. Playing poker one night with several Willys executives, he won enough money to buy his Hay Fever Haven in Traverse City, Michigan. Located 600 feet from beautiful Glen Lake, the home Herman bought had been owned by the foreman of an old sawmill that had burned in 1903. Mother was sure we’d be scalped by Indians, Ray said. Hiking and swimming with their father, the Greene children relished their proximity to water, and for Ray, it reinforced his lifelong love of boats.

Though he built thousands of boats in his career, Ray has always pictured himself more the inventor, like his father, whom he greatly admired. Several anecdotes from his childhood illustrate his mettle.

For a quarter you could buy a Hire’s set-up to make root beer, Ray remembered. "You had to bottle it for a week. I didn’t know about the expansion of gases, but I did know that CO2, dry ice, was the foam in root beer. Father had a five-gallon thing with a gauge on it. So I filled it and put about two pounds of dry ice in. The gauge went over the top. I told Mother to run. The thing blew up and dropped the sink six inches. We had to repaper the whole kitchen.

Later, during Prohibition, I said, ‘Pop, I’d like to make hooch.’ I wasn’t particularly interested in drinking it, just learning how it was made. Mother was horrified. Father said, ‘I can’t think of a better way for him to learn chemistry.’ So I made a couple of jugs.

In the early 1940s, Ray Greene worked on experimental rocket tubes for the military at Wright Field using Owens-Corning Fiberglas products. It was this connection, and his proximity to OCF, that brought fiberglass fabrics into his hands before other boatbuilders’.

Ray built his first boat at age twelve, but his father, disappointed in its construction, threw it out.

While still in high school, at age sixteen, he had formed Ray Greene & Company to build boats in the family’s garage. He was nothing if not inquisitive, bent on understanding how things work. Like many boatbuilders, he loved messing about in boats. At eighteen, there was no reason to forever build with the same materials and methods as generations of builders before him, in wood, piece by piece. Some thought that preformed plywood panels were a big step forward from conventionally planked hulls, but Ray Greene was interested in a quantum leap. His IQ was reportedly 150, and he was determined to use it.

In 1931 Ray entered Ohio State University, building and selling 15-foot one-design Snipes to pay tuition. As he pursued degrees in both mechanical and industrial engineering, his research led him to synthetic resins that then still required