Balsa is at the core of fiberglass boats

By Keith R. Wdton Director, Marine Products Baltek Corp.

lN THE 1950s as fiberglass rein- I forced plastics (FRP) began to make major inroads in the construction of pleasure boats, displacing wood as the traditional boatbuilding material, some wag hoping to stem the tide came up with the slogan, "If God meant to have fiberglass boats, He would have created fiberglass trees. "

Today, versions of that quaint bit of humor emblazoned on little signs are still for sale in the novelty sections of boat shops and marine hardware

Story at a Glance

Balsa wood lills important spot between layers of fiberglass in boat construction end-grain balsa product results lrom 40 years of engineering . . . accepted worldwide lor recreational, commercial, and naval craft.

stores all over the country even though a quick scan of the nation's waterways, marinas, and boat shows indicate fiberglass evidently predominates as the most popular boatbuilding material.

But things are not always what they seem at first glance. Many of those apparently all-plastic and glass boats are really of sandwich construction with fiberglass skins surrounding cores of end-grain balsa wood in decks, superstructures, hull sides, and bottoms.

In the past three decades, some 2 million reinforced plastic boats from canoes to huge luxury cruisers, from sailing dinghies to giant ocean racing sailing yachts, have been built with FRP/balsa-core construction in at least some part of the boat.

This compatible marriage of replenishable balsa wood, "nature's own honeycomb," with manmade plastic materials in modern motor and sailboat fleets was no accident. It was the result of more than 4O years of imaginative, diligent application of engineering, product expertise, development of proprietary produc- tion processes, and implernentation of intensive quality control measures at every step in the milling and pro. cessing of the wood by the world's leading producer of balsa for industrial applications, Baltek Corporation in Northvale, N.J.

PLUG 0l balsa/fiberglass reinlorced phstic was taken from the hull ol a lobster boat. The material is used by more than 1,000 boatbuilders throughout the world for recreational boats up t0 70:80 ft., comrnerchl lishing vessels uD lo 90 tt., and small cratt for theNavy and Coasl Guard.

Although balsa was used extensively as a core material in the earlier years of fiberglass boats, applied in flat sheets of longitudinal-grain wood, it was principally Baltek's development of its Contourkore endgrain balsa in bidirectionally flexible sheets in the mid-llXOs that made the material of special interest to boat builders for hulls as well as decks and superstructures. Blocks of balsa cut across the grain and varying from

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LIGHIER 0YERALL weight of balsa-cored laminates and better slrength-to-weighl ratios imprwe a boat's overall etf iciency. Fuel economy for power boats and easy lowing for the many under 26 fl. boats stored yeararound on a trailer at the owner's home are pluses along with strength and impact resislance.