: Heard a lot about amature kayaks made of a "chicken wire" mesh
: shaed into a kayak form and held with wood. Then having Fiberglass applied
: several coats. And then sanded. Anyone know of any plans for this or the
: specific parts I would need? Please email me at JhnBrackett@aol.com

John, this is a rather uncommon method for building a fiberglass boat. It won't be particularly cheap, easy or lightweight. And it is probable that you'll have a lot of sanding ot do.

To begin with, I was trying to figure out if you meant amateur boat building, or armature boat building. After thinking about it a bit I decided it could have been both.

In sculpture, when a clay item is modeled, it is sometimes built on a wire skeleton called an armature. You bend the wire form until it resembles what you want to scultp, and pack clay on. The armature helps support the soft, moist clay until it can harden.

In a similar fashion, you can use a form made from "chicken wire" (a thin-gauge metal fabric used for making small animal cages and lightweight fencing) to support fiberglass cloth.

If you cover the glass cloth with a liquid plastic resin which can soak into it, when the resin hardens the cloth will be stiff. If your original wire fabric shape looks like a kayak, then your fiberglass covering will look like a kayak.

The theory is simple, but the execution of it, in real life, can lead to an expensive mess. The biggest problems come from dealing with the glass cloth after it is soaked in plastic resin. The open mesh of the chicken wire allows the fabric to sag, giving you a rough looking hull. Building up additional layers of glass cloth on top of this will give you some thickness that you can eventually sand through to even thing out.

But the cost of all the necessary layers of glass cloth is a wallet buster. If your material sags 1/8th inch you'll need at least 4-6 layers of a 6 ounce glass cloth. That way, when you sand off the high spots you'll still have at least 2-3 layers of glass cloth to keep the water out. You can replace some of the glass cloth with a nonwoven mat of glass fibers. It soaks in a lot more resin and gets heavier, but it is a bit cheaper. Pound for pound the glass mat is not as strong as the glass cloth, so you would ant to get a haevier weight of mat.

You will have to be careful with applying mat directly to your wire shape, though. Since it weighs more it will sag more, and that leads back to more sanding. So, consider starting with a layer of glass cloth and resin, when that hardens it should be strong enough to support a layer of glass mat and resin. At this point you can visually check for low spots in the hull. Fill those with mat or cloth, depending on the depth, and get on to your sanding.

Of course when you do all that sanding you are effectively removing almost half of the expensive glass cloth or mat and resin you just put on. In doing so you are also creating a health hazard. All those little bits of glass fibers are floating around, practially waiting for someone to breathe them in.

Assuming you applied the fiberglass to the outside of the boat you now have to deal with the inside. A single layer of glass cloth and resinis a minimum to cover the rough chickenwire. And you have to cover that wire completely or it will rust. You are back to doing a lot of sanding again, trying to remove any rough areas that might make it uncomfortable.

It can be a messy process.

There are ways to make things easier, cheaper and probably better, though. I've had good success with covering chicken wire with a rough paper mache that I make from strips of old newspapers and a flour and water paste. You can increase the strength of your wire form easily and cheaply this way. The dry paper covering can be easily sanded, and then covered with a layer or two of glass cloth and resin for strength and to waterproof the affair. A simpler idea might be to eliminate the chicken wire altogether.

As I see it, the use of the chicken wire is for one of two reasons: Either you form it around the outside of an existing kayak, bending it to match the shape of the first boat so the boat you are building will be similar, or you are going to try to design a kayak shape in a freeform manner, bending the chicken wire as you will, and hoping the boat is symmetrical so you don't end up paddling in circles.

If you are going to do things the first way, then you need to start with an existing kayak that you can borrow. if you are going to do things the second way I think you'll be unhappy. You can look at designs for wooden frames for cloth covered kayaks, and strtech chicken wire over these. or you cna stretch glas cloth over these and forget about the chicken cloth. Lots of designs are available. if you are interested in this route, write back for suggestions on designs. A lot of people here have favorites.

An aside: There is a third reason for using chicken wire, but htis has nothing to do with fiberglass. Small boats can be sculpted from multiple layers of chicken wire or other light wire fabrics. These layers are tied together with twisted wires as close intervals to create a much stronger metal armature which is then covered with a high strength concrete mix that is troweled on and smoothed on both sides. You get a cheap, heavy, durable concrete boat. To be a bit more accurate, this might be called a ferro-concrete boat as it is reinforced with a lot of steel wire. You can check the web with any search engine using the words "concrete canoe" as search terms and get lots of hits from the different web pages of the different colleges that regularly build and race such craft. Civil engineers seem to have annual competitions. 200 pounds of concrete will set you back about $10 to $15. If you build a boat design that can carry 500 pounds, and the boat itself is 200 pounds, you can carry 300 pounds of paddler(s) and gear. The recent entries seem to be lighter than this mark, and designed to hold a bit more weight. If you are committed to chicken wire, try it.

Otherwise, you can make a better kayak by constructing a wood frame and stretching fabric over it. If you want ot use fiberglass cloth, you can. The wood frame is much stiffer than chickenwire so you can stretch the glass cloth tight, eliminating a lot of sags, and the stiff cloth can be painted with a thin coat of plastic resin by using a brush, roller or squeegee, keeping down a lot of the mess. Get a copy of George Putz's book (check for his name on amazon.com for more info on the book) on canvs covered boats. He has plans for a real nice kayak in the book, and gives detailed instructions on how to make it. He describes covering the boat with canvas and paint, which would be cheaper than fiberglass and plastic resin. His estimate of $200 for a boat built as he describes it is accurate -- but you can save about $50 off of that without trying too hard. Care in shopping and laying out the parts is a key to using the least amount of materials.

Hope this helps some.

Write back to the bulletin board if you need more info. I see a lot of people have read your posting and they are probably interested is seeing how it goes.

PGJ