"Are your plate alloy boats hot when in the sun?" Its funny - we rarely get this question from customers in Newfoundland! The answer Steve is that our plate alloy boats do not get uncomfortably hot even in direct tropical sunlight. Seems a bit counterintuitive, doesn't it? A big piece of metal in the sun not getting hot? What most of us think of when we think of a metal vehicle is a car. A car's body is made from sheet steel covered in paint and thus between the steel and paint acts like a heat sink building up heat and holding it. Cars can and do get quite hot in the sun (even here in Maine!).(On a side note - old Landrovers had aluminum alloy bodies - if you ever put your hand on a Landrover in the sun you would be surprised at the difference between them and a Jeep, for instance) Aluminum in general and 5000 series alloy additionally are both tremendous conductors of heat rather than great accumulators of heat. The only metals better than aluminum for conducting heat are silver, gold and copper. For instance both very high-end cookwear and stadium bleacher seats are made from aluminum alloys. For cookwear the ability of the alloy to pass heat directly from the burner to the food is extremely important in cooking. More importantly when the chef turns down the heat the temperature in the pan goes down immediately as the alloy doesn't hold the heat. In a cast iron skillet you can turn down the heat but the darn thing will be very hot for a good long time afterwards! Lastly you can actually hold the handle of an alloy skillet when the pan is over the burner as the heat is mostly dissipated by the time it reaches your hand. Same thing but in reverse for bleachers. If made from steel or even fiberglass you would have a lot of shreiking women at every Miami Dolphins game as the set their keisters on a heat sink. With our boats the alloy sheds what heat it takes-on very quickly as the boat is residing in 90 degree air and 70 degree water (I'm using Mexico numbers, I believe) thus the boat will equalize with its surroundings. The only exception to this is our non-skid floor. The chemical composition of this does have some heat sink properties and the floor can become quite warm. As our non-skid is very, very aggressive to begin with you are probably not wearing bare feet anyhow but if you were in bare feet you would probably want to take a bucket of seawater now and again and cool it off. Steve, I hope that I've answered your question. If you would like I will send you a sample piece of 1/4" 5086 Plate Alloy to set on your veranda - there's nothing like a test to prove a point! Thank you, Jay PS. Most of the snow is gone from our lawn - should only be another week or so until its all gone.... |
Black Lab Marine, Inc. 72 Lafayette Street Yarmouth, Maine, USA 04096 Email: info@blacklabmarine.com Phone: 207-400-7404 |