wood boat hull thickness
As a hull made of vacuum bagged epoxy, & high quality fabrics can be 4-6x as strong as a hand laid hull made from polyester resin, & cheap fabrics, thickness per thickness, or pound per pound. in older boats things are a lot thicker, as they didn't know how strong grp was back then, nor did they have tools like fea.. I admit in advance that i should leave these things to a naval architect or proven designer. with that in mind, please advise me... is there a constant or formula that will permit one (me) to figure out the proper thickness of the deck, topsides and hull for a plywood hull that will never touch bottom? i am thinking of a sort of... "if the boat is thirty feet long, the topsides should be 3/4. Too thick technically the gelcoat should be only 1.5 mm thick so that it can flex with the laminate, however i work in the boat repair game and regularly see gel that is up to 10mm thick - which in my opinion is too thick , thats why the boats end up full of spidercracks with the smallest impact. its also due to not enough supervision on the shop floor, the laminators end up loading the gel. 
wood boat hull thickness On that basis, an epoxy composite hull weighing the same as an aluminium hull will have much more thickness in its hull. besides, wood floats. i have the benefit of three sons of 24, 19 and 16, who are incredibly keen to build this 45 footer as they like boating.. There are many ways to construct a wood-epoxy boat. one could, for example, build a wood-epoxy plank-on-frame vessel, but this would be labor intensive and the boat would be needlessly heavy and thick. in practice, there are three basic approaches–strip-plank construction, sheet plywood construction, and so-called cold-molded construction..
