Fruits Of My Labor (A-113)

[ebb]

C'pete sir,
We have an digression of opinion, based on personal observation.

The shelves in 338 took an act of congress to deconstruct, What had a chance to move were the stubby pieces that held the forward and aft chainplates - they hadn't moved because of the thickness of mat tabbing holding them to the hull - tho there was some rot on the tops. They hadn't moved even tho they were being steadily pulled from the top by the chainplates. The bottom of the forward chainplates were glassed to the shelf!

So all 4 sets of shelves helped the stringers to keep the hull from flexing - or from working. On 338. As I observed, the hull topside on the exact opposite side of the stringer shows a (faint) double imprint of the stringer construction inside. I think the mark comes from extra hot tabbing that was probably used to fix the stringers in place DURING CONSTRUCTION of our boats.

The polyester is hard as a rock. Something would have to be forced against the hull inside to have any effect outside and it would be in the form of a big bow or billow. Even a relatively sharp 3/4" line of ply. The stringer is a 1 1/2" square piece of mahogany that is fairly massively pasted to the hull, 2" wide minimum. I don't think the polyester is gummy enough to imprint the stringers locally as we observe.

The topsides are thinner the closer you get to the sheer, BUT how thin and how flexible would they have to be to make an exact picture of the stringer inside?

The marks had to have occured in the soft early stage of construction when the whole boat was new. That's the only time that something added to the inside would be able to suck a localized area of the hull into an imprint. Kind of like a love bite.