The Daily Record

Frederick OTHMAN
WASHINGTON—I met an aviator the other day, who said he had a nice little sideline manufacturing plastic bathtubs.

He said they had two tremendous advantages: 1. They're easy to carry upstairs when you're building your house and, 2, They're not so cold to sit in when you're taking a bath.

I was pondering this improvement in bathing when along came my old friend, Maurice Lannon of Hollywood, with a book entitled "Polyester and Fibreglass." He said he'd written it and he thought maybe I ought to read it.

My thought was that the title didn't sound so exciting, but Maurice said he still believed I'd find it interesting. Ignore the title, he said. Now my eyes are bulging.

An unbelievable material, he said, is a mixture of polyester plastic and glass fibre. It's good for making those bath tubs, as well as automobile bodies, bullet proof vests, skis, garden furniture and coffins. All susceptible of being manufactured in the cellar, said Maurice.

Polyester plastic is about like corn syrup until you add a catalyst, he said, and then it becomes hard. Sandwich it around a piece of cloth made of glass and you've got one of the toughest materials there is.

So you slosh the syrup onto the cloth with a paint brush. One good catalyst is a yellow powder, which causes the plastic to harden in the sunlight. Maybe you want to build a glass automobile body.

This is easy, Maurice says, if you're capable of building one of tin. You'll need some plaster molds of the proper size and shape. You drape the cloth on these, paint on the plastic until you have maybe nine layers and you've got a plastic motor car.

I'm simplifying the process here a good deal, because Maurice goes into detail about mixing plastic and catalyst, building molds, and cutting out fibre-glass patterns. This seems to be a good deal like making slip covers and maybe your wife would be helpful with the scissors.

Maurice adds that polyester and glass fiber is ideal for fixing leaky pipes and coating the hulls of boats so they'll glisten like mirrors. The trouble with plastic in the basement is that a lot of things affect them and the author suggests don't be discouraged if it takes your homemade bathtub a week, or even a month, to dry.

The way he calculates, an automobile body will cost about a dollar a square foot to build at home; a bathtub should be a little cheaper. He also urges care: an automobile body in the soup stage burns like a Roman candle.

Maurice also goes into detail about the proper method of embedding a rose in a chunk of clear plastic. This isn't easy because flowers contain water and plastics don't mix with that. So you dry your flower, and more often than not you ruin it. Have plenty of flowers. Maybe you'd better start with pansies, because these are the simplest.

You bury them in dry corn meal to get the water out. Then you've got to worry about them fading.

It may be still better to forget about flowers for a starter and begin with well-dried spiders. And there you are and if I write any more about this, how will Maurice sell any of his books?

He works by day at the Hollywood Citizen-News and builds automobile bodies by night. His fingernails glisten. So would yours, if you smeared much plastic on sheets of glass fiber.

This obviously is a fine hobby. It has only one drawback and that is Mrs. Lannon. To stay liquid, plastic polyester has to be kept cold; Maurice keeps his in the refrigerator, where there seldom is room for mere bacon and eggs.