Balsa is at the core of fiberglass boats

By Keith R. TValton 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. t t

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 fills important spot between layers of fiber. glass in boat construction end-grain balsa product results lrom 40 years of engineering . . accepted worldwide for 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 Ieast 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 40 years of imaginative, diligent application of engineering, product expertise, development of proprietary produc- tion processes, and implementation of intensive quality control measures at every step in the milling and processing of the wood by the world's leading producer of balsa for industrial applications, Baltek Corporation in Northvale, N.J.

PLUG ol balsa/fiberglass reinforced plastic was taken from the hull of a lobster boat. The material is used by more than 1,000 boatbuilders throughout the world for recreational boals up to 70-80 ft., commercial fishing vessels uo to 90 ft., and small craft for the Navy and Coast 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-1960s 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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LIGHTER OVERALL weight of balsa-cored laminates and better strength-to-weight ratios improve a boat's overall eff iciency. Fuel economy for power boats and easy towing lor the manv under 26 ft. boats st0red year around oh a trailer at the owner's home are pluses along with strength and impact resistance.