Hull White

13 Oct, 2004 in art pottery by admin

Hull White

Sailing Boat Hulls

Sailing Boat Hull

A hull is the body of a sailing boat. It provides the buoyancy that prevents the vessel from sinking.

Traditional sailboats are monohulls, but multi-hull catamarans and trimarans are becoming more and more popular.

All sailing boats have keels - it's the backbone of the hull. Even multihulls have keels. On a sailboat the word keel is also used to refer to the area that is added to the hull to improve its lateral plane. Keels use the forward motion of the boat to generate lift. Sailboats have much larger keels than non-sailing hulls.

Most monohulls require ballast, depending on the design ballast will be 20 to 50 per cent of the displacement. The ballast is often integrated into their keels as large masses of lead or cast iron. This secures the ballast and gets it as low as possible to improve its effectiveness. A monohull keel is made effective by a combination of weight, depth and length.

A keel does not provide a stabilising effect but instead applies a capsizing force. This capsizing effect needs to be offset by hull design.

There are many types of fixed keels, including:

Full keel, ong keels, Fin keels, Winged keels, Bulb keels, Bilge keels and Monohull.

A monohull is a type of boat having only one hull, unlike multihulled boats which can have two or more individual hulls connected to one another. This is the most common form of vessel.

Monohull boats usually rely on ballast for stability, and are sometimes called displacement hulls. This gives the monohull a degree of sluggishness, making it less manoeuvrable and reducing its speed. It also makes it more likely to sink if filled with water.

A multihull is a vessel with more than one hull. Multihulls are faster than monohulls because the absence of ballast reduces their weight. Designed to be as lightweight as possible, yet maintain structure, they are also built with flotation chambers. This means that, if every crew compartment becomes filled with water, the hull itself has enough buoyancy to keep afloat. This absence of ballast also results in a higher performance vessel, in terms of speed and manoeuvrability.

Multihulls are popular for racing and for cruising. Until the 1980s most multihull sailboats were built either by their owners or by boat builders on a semi-custom basis.

One disadvantage of a multihull is the width, especially when docking.

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Painting the standard white hull of an Enterprise dinghy a different colour. Where do I start?

I'm restoring a wooden enterprise dinghy and thinking of painting the standard white hull a different colour. Where would I start? Sanding? I assume you would need to create a 'key' for a layer of paint....

the first thing to do is to decide what brand of paint you want to use and then follow their prep. instructions. we recently fiberglass and painted a 14' plywood skiff and used interlux paint products (petit also makes easy to use paint)

we had had good results using one or two part polyurethane paints. these paints give a hard, very durable high gloss finish.

normal steps in prepping a painted boat is to first chemically wash the boat with their solvent (to remove any wax) then sand the paint. wash the boat with soap/water. dry the boat, apply one or two undercoats of paint, sanding between coats, and the two coats of polyurethane high gloss paint. using a foam roller and tipping out the paint with a dry sable brush will give you great results.

interlux paint has a good painting guide that you can find on line by searching for "interlux painting guide"

http://www.yachtpaint.com/usa/

hope this helps

Clampdown, Hull. White Riot The Lamp. 14.12.09