The reason that racing gliders are expensive is that after the wings come out of the moulds - which are made with great care - they still get hundreds of hours of manual finishing. I'm pretty sure that labour costs more than the rest of the structure (ie excluding instruments) put together.
I have to confess I don't know which one they use, my brother is the sprayer. I seem to recall it was over 10 years though as having had a boat with painted decks and topsides I did mention longevity of finish. I know Russell had Lucy painted and pretty sure Pete had Ariam painted, both must be 6-8 years ago now so may be able to comment.
Do I remember that my Dad's Pik wings came from a metal mould?
Princess Yachts are doing pretty well, actually!
You don’t seem to have read or understood any of my posts yet are commenting as if you’re familiar which you evidently are not. I can introduce you to the team who spray them if you like!
It's possible, but unlikely, I think. In the late 90s I visited Karlsruhe Akaflieg where one of the members was doing his Dipl.Ing. project on experimental metal wing moulds, and I got the impression that it was a new thing. However, Piks had laminar flow sections which had to be made with great precision, so if any older manufacturer was going to use metal moulds, it would be them.
Seamless but not very strong. The advice I got to go cured polyester - epoxy - new polyester came from the chemical technology group at the Rutherford Lab, where I was seconded for a while developing tests for bond strength in composites. They knew what they were doing - the Big Project while I was there was developing fuel tanks for the HOTOL project.
But some of the light blue is below the waterline - isn’t it normal to use colourless gel coat in that instance or did that become standard practice in the 80’s?
Clear gel coat below the waterline was not universal, although you are right some, particularly up market builders did introduce to try and reduce potential osmosis. Most builders, though did continue with tinted gel coat, but of course invariably white. Pretty sure that in the 70s when the subject boat was moulded the same gel coat would have been used for the whole layup. It looks like on this boat the topsides have ben painted dark blue at a later date.
The metal moulds I saw were machined out of aluminium billets, 7.5m long, 1m wide and about 30cm deep. One side got the wing shape (top/bottom, left/right) and the other was largely cut away to leave a webbed supporting structure in order to save weight. Since the wing skins are very thin, my guess is that there wouldn't be much heating. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing I don't know. I believe the aim was to reduce the finishing time required.
My 1975 Westerly had dark blue gel coat everywhere.