Fairey Marine hot-moulded hulls
Friday, April 9, 2010 at 7:21AM 
Fairey Marine, Hamble, England. A hot-moulded mahogany hull.
Back to plywood. In the next issue of On Site: small things, we have an article by Charles Lawrence who writes about Fairey Marine which took Fairey Aviation's wartime wood laminate experience in making aircraft to the making of powerboats in the 1950s and 60s. They built up a monococque hull with six layers of wood glued in cross directions over a solid block form, and then the whole lot was baked at boiling point in an autoclave, producing a lightweight nearly indestructible hull.
It was in a white Fairey Huntress that James Bond chased his enemies, in Fairey Huntsmans, in From Russia With Love. Wonderfully evocative names for these boats: Fantome, Swordsman, Spearfish. Fleet and nimble, slicing through the waves, many are still in the water.
The hot-moulded Fairey hull, like the moulded Eames chairs, eventually went over to fibreglas and, I expect, much of the magic was lost.
design, material culture, tools 
Reader Comments (2)
Indeed - I'm afraid to report I think that particular brand of magic was lost. HOWEVER! I worked on a masterplan a couple of years ago for the then dormant Fairey boatyard. The site had been bought by Duran Duran's manager and he wanted to create a leisure cum culture oriented residential marina. In the spirit of the band's famous videos, the main draw was to be a state of the art recording studio, inspired by Chris Blackwell's Compass Point in Nassau, which in the interests of achieving planning permission would offer sound engineering courses for local kids as a community benefit. It was such a retro vision! The guy was unaware that the latest pop hits were being turned out on laptops in teenagers' bedrooms. I do remember we did design a lovely new vaporetto route though, to connect the site with other settlements up and down the river. That would have been nice.
well, yes, retrograde in many senses: it was Duran Duran. The genius loci of the site itself seems to have been made irrelevant; it was just a good bit of waterfront to develop into a theme park thing. It amazes me that with all the money, and it is a huge amount, washing around southern England, why the handmade, the bespoke, the exclusively designed – something Britain used to be known for in earlier eras – is considered so hopelessly uninteresting. Why is it cool to have a Fairey Huntress from 1963, but it wouldn't be cool if it was made now, even if a small boatyard only made 50 a year and they were sold for a great price. Exclusivity carries negative credence today. Does exclusivity always have to mean class distinction? Could exclusivity possibly mean intellectual or aesthetic distinction?