I should have been more clear Epoxy/Carbon fiber. My bad

My guess is that the running surface is solid lamination and will not likely have lamination issues. Sounds like the tunnel and deck are balsa cored, (unitized construction), and would be the potential problem areas if there was to be one.

Joe

I don't have a dog in the fight, or any first-hand experience with NorTechs at all but, just a fun fact....

It is my understanding, from a model boating buddy (a tooling engineer for a large fiberglass molding company in Michigan) that carbon does not "wet out" with literally any resin. It does not bond with the resin, but is "encapsulated" (his term), and is always layered with glass or Aramid, or is vacuum bagged. I myself have seen it "float" when not blanketed with some other fabric. He also told me that the vast majority of failures such as cracking or delamination are the result of too much resin, regardless of type of resin or fabric material. The resin cracks, and the crack then propagates through the fabric. With proper layup, glass and Aramid (especially) are actually quite flexible and resilient to fatigue.

That said, I would have to think that NorTech has their lamination process pretty well sorted out.

Carry on....

Thanks. Brad.

Aramid
googled that to see what it is.

https://www.google.com/search?client...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Sutphen,

Yup. Kevlar and Nomex are trade names, like Lexan (polycarbonate) and Teflon (PTFE). We laymen tend to start using these trade names, instead of the compound name, and it can get confusing when someone uses a competitor's trade name. I try and use the compound name to avoid these confusions. Being a machining job shop, we see the compound name more often than we do trade names in the material blocks on prints for that very reason. It's just become habit.

Thanks. Brad.

I don`t know how OL`s are made but you can feel small vibrations thruout the whole boat and when it hits waves it sounds hollow.
on a 52' OL you can feel the engines vibrate all the way in the front bed. not a little , a lot.
I didn`t like it at all.

Been in many spark plug wires since we where young. Yes, we were young once.

SB,

Didn't know that.

Thanks. Brad.

I remember looking along the sides of the sponsons of a Skater and a Nor-Tech at Fastboats.com in Pompano Beach many years ago.

The epoxy Skater was straight while the vinylester Nor-Tech was wavy.

Nor-Tech cats were a ”good enough” ”value for money” play.

And that Skaters probably had to have new fuel tanks done because the ethanal ate through the old ones, and dozens of repairs for rotted balsa that just keeps coming. All the while, the Nor-tech just kept taking the abuse and never needed any of that......