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Abstract

A building element useful in constructing plastic boat hulls and methods of making the element. The building element includes a plurality of glass fibers in the form of roving which are substantially parallel to each other, a resin binding the glass fibers together, and a plastic sheet covering one or both sides. The building element may be continuously made by passing a plurality of strands of glass fiber roving through a perforated guide plate into a trough of resin formed by the bight of a pair of rollers, feeding a plastic sheet over each roller into said bight to protect the rollers from the resin and to form a sandwich structure with the resin impregnated strands of roving being enclosed within the plastic sheets, and cutting across the plastic sheets and resin impregnated glass strands at a desired angle to form a stamp element. The building element may also be made by passing glass fiber roving through a resin pot and winding the roving around a drum which is covered by a polyethylene sheet. When the roving has reached the desired thickness, the building element is formed by cutting across the sheet and fibers and removing it from the drum. To build a boat hull, the building element is placed in a mold with the plastic cover sheet up, rollers are pressed against the outer surface of the dry plastic sheet to press the air out of the resin impregnated glass fibers and to press the fibers into good contact with a preceding layer in the mold, and the plastic sheet is removed. A succeeding building element has its fibers running at an angle to the fibers of the previous element. Light-weight blocks may be used to build up the thickness of the boat hull.

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