an economy of means
construction | boats by charles lawrence
plywood laminates
speedboats shipbuilding
hot-moulding by Fairey Marine
In 1945, in Hamble, an English coastal village, Fairey Aviation needed to make best use of their skilled workforce and waterside factory, newly redundant from making warplanes. As many of the aircraft components had been fabricated from wood and the company’s directors were keen sailors, their choice of new products for mass-production was perhaps inevitable.
Their first boat was the Firefly, a 12 foot sailing dinghy, designed by the well known yachtsman Uffa Fox. By 1963 it had became the world’s most popular racing dinghy with 3,000 in use in 36 countries. Great attention had been given to the detail of the whole design, and bespoke fittings included a metal alloy mast, but it is the wooden hull that is important to this story. This lightweight hull was a single piece of plywood, formed as the finished shape of the boat, and with no need for internal framing: the manufacturing process was hot-moulding. The hull shell was built up from layers of wood glued together and heated in a pressure chamber called an autoclave. The planks were of African mahogany – Agba – about an eighth of an inch thick and up to six inches wide which were pre-shaped to a template and layered diagonally across a solid wooden buck. This buck was made from four inch timbers which were glued, pegged together and then carefully fashioned and faired to the interior shape of the designed boat. From this buck all future hulls of a particular design were built – all of which were exactly alike. The bucks were capable of being used many hundred times – one produced 700 boats which means that it was in and out of the autoclave and subjected to a heat of 212° F over 700 times. To hot mould a hull the appropriately shaped planks for the first skin were stapled to the buck. The second and subsequent skins were laid in alternate directions and were glued, one side only, by being passed through a glue spreading machine. As the second skin was applied, the staples holding the first were removed and so on until the appropriate number of skins was built up, from three to nine depending on their location and the size of the hull. The buck itself was mounted on a flat metal plate carried on a trolley running on a rail track. The plate was larger than the buck, which allowed a rubber sheet, lowered on to the laid-up shell on the buck, to be clamped down round the edges to ensure a good airtight joint. A vacuum was then applied until the rubber was stretched tight over the whole of the top surface of the shell. The unit was then wheeled into the autoclave where steam heat and additional pressure were applied ensuring good contact while
the shell was being cured. After at least half an hour (depending on the number of skins used for the shell) the baked shell was taken out of the autoclave and removed from the buck. Many different classes of dinghies were successfully produced over the next thirty years, their hulls renowned for their longevity, resistance to rot, light weight and elegance. Fairey Marine, as this part of the company was known, was producing 1,000 boats a year and had become ‘the largest boatbuilder in the World, outside America’. * In 1957, nearly ten years after the start of Firefly production, it was decided to build seagoing motorboats, and an innovative deep-V hull design was obtained from Ray Hunt, a well known American naval architect. This first 23 foot boat was developed by Alan Burnard, the company’s naval architect, into a very successful range of offshore motorboats with such evocative names as Huntress, Huntsman, and Swordsman. The hulls were also sold to other boatbuilders and individuals for fitting out, including four to Vancouver Police Department. The famous Fairey motorboats were elegant family cruisers, yet capable of offshore racing without modification, and were surprisingly competitive against purpose-designed racing boats. The boats pioneered the seaworthy deep-V hull form, the hot moulded construction and the use of diesel engines in fast boats. A large proportion of the 600-plus motorboats produced have survived today, the pride of their devoted owners. And nearly a dozen of the hulls remain in daily use as working fishing boats based in the south coast town of Weymouth. Hot-moulded production continued until the early 1970s, when the labour-intensive production of wooden boats could no longer compete financially with their fibreglas competitors. Fairey then offered alternative fibreglas hulls for both the dinghies and motorboats, although sadly these too eventually succumbed to economic pressures as the company concentrated on larger commercial and military vessels. All Fairey marine identity had vanished by 1990, when after various mergers the company was swallowed by a large shipbuilder. v
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