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Wooden Boat Building –Why Wood? – A question often asked
Posted under Build Your Own Boat, Wooden Boat BuildingWhy wood? Wooden Boat Building may seem old fashioned with a choice of modern materials such as Aluminum or Steel or Glass Fiber reinforced Polyester Resin (fiberglass) but; as a material for building boats and small ships; wood has a number of significant advantages over the other alternatives.
The first is the fact that wood has the highest Quality Coefficient for boat building. What does that mean? It means that for a given size a properly built wooden boat will be the strongest for any given weight. When comes to resisting the stress place on hulls by the pounding of waves and water, tests have shown that wood is nearly twice as resistant to these stress’s as the other materials.
Wood also has the best thermal and acoustic properties of any boat building material. You don’t find condensation running down the inside of your wooden boat nor do you have to listen to drumming caused by the slap of waves on the hull.
Wood also has no galvanic corrosion problems.
And of course nothing is as pleasing to the eye as beautifully finished timber; notice that the best builders in all the other materials still use timber in their interior fit-outs.
Given that wood is also buoyant, relatively cheap, and widely available and easily worked and is particularly suited for small boats (up to about 6 meters in length) it is no wonder that Wooden Boat Building is especially popular with amateur builders. Timber can be worked with the simplest of tools; most of the work can be done with only cheap hand tools. The natural bending characteristics of wood mean that pleasing smooth, symmetrical lines can obtained without special moulds or bending equipment.
Other natural characteristics of wood such as its durability and resilience make it ideal for boatbuilding. If properly maintained and protected from the elements and marine or freshwater organisms a wooden boat will last a lifetime.
The question might be asked if wood is so good a boat building material why are there so many fiber-glass and aluminum boats around. The answer probably comes down to the ability to mass produce such boats. When the cost of labor is taken into account a wooden boat can be much more expensive. An aluminum or even steel boat can be made quickly out of stamped or prefabricated sections assembled on a jig and welded together and a fiberglass boat is built in a mould with a combination of woven and chopped glass-fibre being encased in plastic like resin.
That is not to say that these techniques and materials are inferior for boat building (the vast majority of new boats are built from one of these materials and cost alone is not the only reason) but they are more suited to production line methods than to one off efforts.For the amateur builder the cost of specially made moulds (for fiber-glass) and welding equipment, special templates or jigs and specialist skill (aluminum welding) quickly push the advantage towards wood as the building material of choice for the one off home builder.
You can join the many thousands of people engaged in Wooden Boat Building, taking advantage of the ready availability of wood in most parts of the world.
Next time I’ll explore some of the many different methods of Wooden Boat Building.