Recently I have been pondering the aesthetic challenges of including Bolero's registration info and name on her hull. I am just not a big fan of stickers no matter how nice. One morning over coffee my buddy Craig and I were discussing the merits of adding a faux wood stern with an engraved and painted name to the stern of a plastic boat. At the time it didn't seem right for Bolero.
A few days later Craig found this picture which I sure liked.
I still don't know if I see this on Bolero, or how one might get it to look right on a plastic boat, but it sure looks fine on this sexy daysailor.
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I have seen a number of wood boats where a veneer is added to the actual wood transom because it can a) cover old wood damage or stains, b) provide a more uniform grain pattern, or c) cover tails of planking that were not desirable.
Considering that, your situation is just a matter of substrate. Is it OK to laminate over fiberglass, rather than wood? Lots of teak deck are laminated to glass deck substrate...Cheoy Lee, for example....why not a transom? No one seems to complain about decks unless they leak.
For a transom, you could vacuum bag the lamination with a thin plywood, or sheet rubber caul plate to hold the veneer flat while it cures. The glass hull would be able to provide an air-tight seal for bagging, as opposed to a wood hull. I would nix the carved idea, however, as it would necessitate a thick lamination, and the edges seem like an unattractive problem to resolve.
The glass would need to be long-board blocked as glass molds are notoriously full of low frequency surface waves. A wave in that surface would be likely to leave a bubble in the lamination, unless it were vacuum bagged. Then the wave would transfer to the finish on the veneer....
Anyway, a veneer could be quite attractive...the edges are always fussy.
Cliff
fortunately, the boat you refer to as plastic with a wood transom is a wooden replica of a Herreshoff Watch Hill 15, plank on frame.
As Bud said, "Kitty" is the Watch Hill 15 built by Artisan Boatworks. This link has a little writeup: http://www.artisanboatworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Newsletter-December-2011.pdf. There's also an interesting spot about electric propulsion in a classic yacht. Back to Kitty - you can find a full gallery from all angles on the website. Lovely little boat.
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