: Hello out there , I wonder if any of you can think of an alternative material
: to
: stripbuild a canoe? I'm thinking of using one or another kind of plastic in
: stead of wood! Gluing or welding , do not know yet! ( no epoxy , no
: fibers.....)

: There are so many sorts of plastics with different characteristics , in my
: opinion there must be plastics suitable for stripbuilding!
: Anyone there who knows more about that item, glad to hear from you

Jos - I've thought about that idea quite a bit - I thought it might work to use hollow plastic tubes, either round or rectangular - for stripbuilding. They should bend well and bridge the forms, and be much lighter than solid plastic. I never got much farther than that - McMaster-Carr (www.mcmaster.com) has a page describing the engineering properties of plastics on page 3468 of their online catalog. I think you could make a cool boat out of 3 to 5 mm plastic (or phenolic resin paper) tubing with glass inside and out. It would be a job to keep the weight of epoxy down and there would be other issues to worry about, obviously. But still, it would be cool.

Carl