Boatbuilding in India

I was in south India on a recent trip, and while going down a highway (Indian version of a highway) I noticed a large fishing boat sitting up on the side of the road. It looked similar to the hundreds of boats I'd seen pulled up on the beaches in Chennai. And there appeared to be people doing some work on it.

Several weeks later I went back past the same location and stopped to check it out. Sure enough, it was an Indian boatbuilding "factory". They were happy to let me wander around and take a few photos of their work. The boats being manufactured here are open fishing vessels of two sizes: the larger are about 12 meters, the smaller about 8 meters. The larger boats are made up in 3 sections on male molds, then pieced together manually. The smaller vessels are made in one piece in a female mold. They are powered by "outboard" motors - that is, internal combustion engines mounted on a rotating vertical pipe that allows them to be steered with a long pole. The prop is on a long shaft that just extends out the back of the engine into the water well behind the boat. The larger boats have two of these engines, the smaller ones a single engine.

This guy is mixing up a batch of resin paste to use for gluing the deck down to the stringers. It appears that a lot of the strength of the design is due to this - lateral box stringers with a continuous membrane across them.		One of the older members of the work crew - don't ask. Actually, a kid this size in south India could very well be in his late teens.
They may not get paid much, but they seem to be having fun. Maybe it's just because I was taking pictures.		Lots of paste on the stringers. You may notice that all of the resin mix is brick red. I'm assuming that they use dirt as a filler material in the mix, since the earth in this area is very red - and cheap!
Nice clean working environment. No heat build-up from these resin pots! I'll bet they've been re-used for several decades.		Notice the bare hands and dust from the dried resin powder. Where's OSHA when you need them? Actually, I've seen similar working conditions in some of the major boat factories in Florida. People who live in fiberglass houses...
Notice glass mat and woven roving. I wonder how they come up with the lamination schedules? Lots of experience and trial and error, I expect. No naval architects on this street...		I'm sure the materials are expensive, especially by their standards. They told me one boat sells for about 2 lakh rupees. That's about $5,000 US. Of course, the labor costs are peanuts.
Pulling the bow section together with the center section. The bags are weighting down the cockpit sole on the stringers while it's drying. They did all of this in a period of 10-15 minutes while I was watching.		Getting the alignment right. I didn't actually watch them complete the attachment, but you can see on the finished hull below that it's done pretty cleanly.
A section of a larger boat in progress.		More sections in progress. I had to assume the bricks are to insure the sections don't lift off the molds while they're drying.
The scantlings on the hull sections are quite thin. As I said, I expect the strength comes from the stringers and the deck. It would seem these could be holed fairly easily. But maybe they're smart enough not to let that happen.		The finished product, almost. These boats can carry lots of fishermen, nets and fish. They work in the open ocean fairly near shore.
This is a female mold used for one of the smaller vessels. I didn't get close enough to tell if the blue is the inside of the mold or a gelcoat layer for a new layup. I have no idea how they get the boats out of these molds, but you can be pretty sure it involves people and hands.		Well-maintained molds - ha, ha. This heat gun was the only tool I saw there other than their bare hands. Ironically, it is sitting next to a traditional Indian broom, the design of which probably goes back tens of thousands of years. Old world meets new world.