Fiberglass boats built by HMCo

[b.beardsley]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snipe1905/

This may be old news to the historians out there, but I saw Dyer Jones, president of HMM recently and he told me that HMCo built a few fiberglass dinghies during the war. I know there's a fiberglass boat about a foot long in the museum but I didn't know there were any full-size boats. John Palmieri was kind enough to share this picture of Halsey in one in 1945. It's 9 feet long and looks enough like Cape Cod Shipbuilding's MK dinghy that I wonder if the latter was designed by Sidney. Anybody ever seen one of these? HMM doesn't know of any, but as Dyer said "they didn't turn to dust".
Dyer's family business, The Anchorage (Dyer Dhow,etc), was one of the pioneers of fiberglass, experimenting with similar dinghies starting about 1944.

[HerreshoffHistory]

Not old news, Bill! Thanks for the reminder!

I wonder how many of these boats they actually built.

It's plan is in the plans collection at MIT.

It is the only Herreshoff plan --- of more than 13,000 --- which contains the word "plastic"!

[Charles Barclay]

As an aside, the MIT "Tech" dinghy, designed by George Owen and built at HMCo, updated by Halsey a couple of decades ago, is being built in Carbon in its latest iteration.

[Adam]

If one goes to Cape Cod Shipbuilding they have a boat model in fiberglass that was a test model for the military:

"In 1947 After learning that the military was interested in fiberglass boats during one of his trips to the pentagon, E.L. worked with Mr. Bell of American Cyanamid in New York to built fiberglass products.  The first fiberglass boat built by Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co. was a model made under the office.  Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co. Continued to perfect the art of fiberglass boat building."

Was Mr. Sid working for CCSB by then?