RE The champion world according to Pat Goff

[sdibrell]

Mr. Goff, I enjoyed your history of Champion!
I recently purchased a 201 late 80's model which supposedly has a graphite hull and was built for one of the owners. Do you know anything about that? Did Champion make graphite hulls? Thanks, Fred

[pmgoffjr]

I don't think so, but lots of things are possible.

[btsmbass]

There's two types of graphite hulls. One is a coating, one is a carbon fiber resin matrix system.

The coating is similar idea as sanding and blueprinting, if you understand chemistry you know that carbon is basically a 2D diamond. Bullet proof one directionwith covalent bonds and seperates super easy 90* with the london dispersion bonds. That is the idea behind the coating, they "manufacture" a strong bond to the hull and let the covalent bonds of the graphite(carbon) do its job and offer both the benefits of sanding and blueprinting with great durability.

Carbon fiber hulls offer an extremely high strain rate and when laid properly use much less material and resin than fiberglass, even less than kevlar. The gain there is speed, but due to its application and brittleness carbonfiber is both cost prohibitive and not quite as durable as glass/kevlar layups.

You do see carbon fiber quite a bit in blow boat racing though, they got money also.

[MMosher]

Lets see some pics.

[mixermarkb]

The 87 that we had growing up was also a "graphite" hull. Not sure what it entailed, maybe was just some graphite cloth instead of fiberglass, but I know they at least marketed a graphite hull that was supposed to save some weight. It seems like back in the old days they were experimenting on a regular basis with layups to get any edge they could on the water.

[Lea]

Welcome to BBC and the Champ forum, Fred....

[clanderman]

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by MMosher &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Lets see some pics.</TD></TR></TABLE>

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