Interesting deck core technique

[Bob McGovern]

I had assumed the Ballad's foam core (Divinycell, correct?) was simply laid into the deck snadwich as sheets or blocks, with the inner skin being laid up over it. Apparently not. It looks like the inner skin was suspended from the outer via small twists of glass fiber in a grid pattern, and the foam core was poured in place.




Have never seen anything like it. Was this typical throughout the production run? On the downside, the foam did not adhere very well to either skin. On the plus side, the skins haven't depended on that (always iffy) FRP-to-foam bond to keep the whole thing together; so even where water has gotten in, there's little actual delamination. On the downside, the fiber twists make removing large pieces of inner skin a real struggle!

Despite the ... lumpy and void-prone nature of pored-in foam, the water that got in around the solar Nicro vent didn't go very far or do meaningful damage.