Woody Thistle Restoration

[Herb Pollock]

I'm restoring a woody Thistle class boat with a hot-molded, mahogany veneer hull. Where can I get the 1/16" thick veneer I need to make some hull repairs that will look good enough to use a varnish finish?

[Ian McColgin]

I'm in the midst of a similar project. I've used some veneers from Boulton (see ads back of WB magazine) and also found some old door veneers all but falling off some discarded doors at the town dump.

[Alan D. Hyde]

I put "veneer mill" into google, and here are a few of the first of many listings that came up:

ERATH Veneer Corporation of Virginia A Trip Through the Veneer Mill... This is adjacent to the Saw Mill and contains the high quality veneer logs. They are kept fresh and wet with a sprinkler system until they are ready to ...
www.wood-veneers.com/evc/tour.html (http://www.wood-veneers.com/evc/tour.html) - 6k - Cached - Similar pages

ERATH Veneer Corporation of Virginia A Trip Through the Veneer MillB&B Rare Woods Tour of the Veneer Mill page for veneer. Exceptional wood veneers for Artists, Craftsmen, Industry.
www.wood-veneers.com/tour.htm (http://www.wood-veneers.com/tour.htm) - 2k - Cached - Similar pages

SCFC Veneer Mills... Plywood Mill. Veneer Mill. 20-99 employees. Dennis Bozard, Manager ... Veneer Mill. Company Wood Buyer. 20-99 employees. Allen Bell, Manager ...
www.state.sc.us/forest/mven.htm (http://www.state.sc.us/forest/mven.htm) - 20k - Cached - Similar pages

***

Quick & pretty boats, Thistles. Good luck with her. Have you ever seen any Highlanders?

Alan

[Ian McColgin]

Yep, Highlander is a nice boat as well.

On the Thistle, mine actually has 5 veneers to the 1/4" as the outer and inner are 1/32" each while the three middle are 1/16". All of which I've decided to ignore, My veneers are metric and not quite 1/16" anyway so I'm laminating five layers running a little proud with the idea of fairing down after.

I'm doing stepped laminations using that nifty template collar on my router that the laminate-countertop trades invented. Makes perfectly fitting hole and insert from one template. Where I have to replace the whole depth of hull, I make the inner step the smallest and enlarge each successive step.

Pretty easy as then I can shape slats temporarily on the inside to give me something to push against. Even on the compound curves, I found that forcing the template over the space to be cut as a hole made a hole the same size as the insert from that template and none of my holes are so huge that there was too much crinkle at the edges.

I could think of no way to make a beveled fit on those surfaces and the plywood structure has butt joints all over anyway. I don't think the step scarfing is any weaker than the rest of the hull.

G'luck

[paul oman]

Let me know if I can help. As a teenager I owned and sailed Thistle #154. I even won Yachting Magazine's Jr article writing contest RE cruising in a thistle (on Long Island Sound) back in 76. Gosh, those were the days!

paul oman
progressive epoxy polymers

[RodB]

I crewed on a Thistle for a couple of years...lots of races... Fast but not very comfortable... I ended up buying a fiberglass Highlander just to play around... Sold it in 1988,

RB