Is that bad?

vinylester is what you build a run of the mill boat out of. Foam core is trying to appease to the masses who are scared of the big scary rot word. And Core bond is basically a puddy that squishes the core and kinda sorta bonds it to the fiberglass…

if the core isn’t bedded into the laminate under vacuum with a wet bed of glass. Hard pass from me dog.

I will STICK with epoxy resin and vacuum bagging when given the choice. My Nor-Tech CC is solid lamination and is built incredibly well. My cats are foam core and epoxy. Do yourself a favor and visit some boat builders to see the vast difference in construction methods and materials that are used. "You will quickly learn how weight, strength, and cost are directly related". Chasing air voids, wet core, powdered core, or delamination issues after a boat is finished is a gut wrenching and expensive process.

Joe

I was looking at the blue one in Canada. Pretty boat

That looks like at least 1/2" of solid glass with extra foam behind it for more strength. Nortech v bottoms are all solid glass and Kevlar mix. don't see why they would do it different in their cats.
The hull sides are foam cored.

So I guess cigarette is run of the mill. Vinylester was always the the best choice until the epoxy craze. Epoxy may be lighter and stronger but has no flex like vinylester and will give you no warning of breaking until it's to late. Had a friends epoxy cat snap a stringer last year, sounded like a 2x4 breaking in half. Pros and cons to each. Almost all manufacturers use foam core now in the hull sides, bottoms and decks. Nortech does it old school and hand lays the bottoms with solid glass and kevlar mix. At least they do the v bottoms this way not sure about the cats. They were always more about quality than chasing light weight and speed.

Epoxy/carbon has no flex "very little" is a better term, and yes everything has a breaking point. E-glass is much more forgiving "flexible" but a rigid hull is the fastest hull. I have one of each in my mini fleet and we run them hard at the best proving grounds out there; LOTO weekends will expose the weak links.

Joe

I dont know what that means. Sounds good enough for me.:popcorn:​​​​​​​

You are confusing the resin with the fabric. Epoxy has the best elongation and fatigue properties. When used as the matrix with high modulus carbon, the failure mode is dominated by the carbon. For high bending moments, epoxy will outperform the vinylester which will outperform polyester. That said vinylester is not cheap and generally used on higher quality craft.

ND1

Sorry, to clarify mine isn’t a nortech but hearing an insurance place tell me that there’s no way anyone would ever insure it because it’s more than 10 years old and having a local agent run it through a company that I know plenty of people with high performance boats and it was good pending a survey made me really wonder about these heavy advertising agencies. On one of my other boats they were triple the price for the same coverage but with a higher deductible.

And yeah when I was being told that no one will insure anything more than 10 years old my thoughts were what there’s been 200 hp boats built in the last 10 years so how the f is that true.