Horn Melon's Surf Diary

Surfing Board 2

2009-09-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

I have tried the board twice at Ocean Beach, which it was built for. First time was waist high but well shaped, the second time wobbly head high surf. Impressions so far: The volume is slightly lower than I expected, so it may not be good for the bigger days. But the volume seems very well distributed. I had deliberately moved it forward with respect my main shortboard, making this one more comfortable to paddle. Overall the board duckdives, paddles, and catches waves well. It feels fast, somehow "slick" on the bottom. I haven't gotten in many turns yet, so I will write more after I get to try it in better surf.

I built this board to replace my T&C shortboard that I just love, but that broke twice, and is completely dented in on the deck after a few years of use. It's pretty silly - shortboards are normally glassed so lightly that they only last a few seasons. So I tried to build a board that will last longer, and used double 6 ounce S-glass and epoxy resin. The board weighs exactly 8 pounds including fins, wax, everything. It feels light for the glass job. It's lighter than my OB semi gun, and a bit heavier than the good old T&C. There are no heal dents after the first two sessions, so far so good... It feels different than the typical 4 oz-glass-job polyester board, but it's a hard to say exactly what the difference is. It's not too stiff, and it's not bad, just different somehow. More testing is needed - I'll report back after more surfing!

Below are a few more pics from the construction.

My low tech backyard cleanroom, where I did the the hotcoating.

Detail of the leash plug - color matched!

Board #2 Finished

2009-09-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

I didn't have the time and patience to properly polish the board, so two weeks ago I sanded it well after glassing, applied a hotcoat, and left it at that. This time I used less resin for the hotcoat - about 9 ounces per side, and it was enough. For the hotcoat I built a tent out of dripcloth to reduce dust, and for the bottom side I also filtered the resin. These things really helped - the hotcoat came out smooth and nice. Some things that went wrong: On the bottom side I machine sanded for the first time, and it went much faster than hand sanding, but it's not 100% even. I also tried my first resin dam when hotcoating the bottom, but it came out just so so.

Last Glass Layer

2009-07-03T11:48:00.000-07:00

Last night I laminated the last layer of 6 oz glass over the deck and rails. Clear resin, no tint. I freelapped the rails onto the bottom. The board looks nicer now, much closer to the deep tinted look I was hoping for. Try clicking the top picture to see it up close.

Hopefully it will look even better after hotcoat and polishing, if I have the patience for that. The only thing that bothers me a bit now is that the laps are not that even - I taped and cut them freehand, instead of using a tool. If it still bothers me after the hotcoat then I might add some pinlines to get a cleaner look. Maybe white pinlines?

Used 30 oz of resin this time, which was still more than needed, but made it real easy to wet out the laps. I think it was below 70F in the evening when I mixed up the resin, and there was plenty of time to tuck the laps, even with fast hardener.

The board is very light, despite using 6 oz glass. I should weigh it before I hotcoat and gloss, to see how much weight is added by each step. Currently it feels like a real high performance shortboard... especially compared to board #1 - the tank.

Tinting Trouble, but Good Surf

2009-06-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

The glassing is now 2/3rds done. This was my first time doing resin tints, and I screwed up twice.
The bottom was supposed to be a transparent, soft but glowing orange, which I had carefully arrived at by doing test panels (see previous posts for pictures.) I knew exactly how many drops of yellow and red to use per ounce of resin to get that color. But it would have involved counting ~ 150 drops of pigment, and I was too impatient... So I just added the color by feel, and ended up adding way too much yellow pigment. As a result, the resin ended up opaque, and brownish red instead of orange. Argh... I contemplated throwing away the mixed resin, and making a new batch, but decided that was too much waste. So I glassed with this (literally) shitty color.

In the picture above you see that color on the rails and on the floor, but the whole bottom of the board has that color, too. Argh.

My clever wife recommended too "Embrace the Brown", and to match it with a "Sea-greenish Blue" on the deck. Since she is much better with colors than me, I went for it. Of course, I made the mistake of improvising with the color mixture again, but this time I went wrong the other way, and added too little pigment. So the deck color is too transparent, and the color is pretty un-even.

So that's the status. I also trimmed the laps. The next steps are some sanding, and adding a second clear layer of glass that extend over the deck and rails. So hopefully the board will end up with that nice, deep, tinted look in the end... It's a shame that the colors didn't come out better, as I was very happy with the shape.

I glassed with fast hardener this time, and it was a hot weekend (85F?), so I had to work fast. When I did the bottom + laps, I almost ran out of time with the laps. I mixed up too much resin, as I read that it's better to have too much than too little when working with color, and because I didn't know how much extra to add when going from 4oz to 6oz glass. I mixed 39 ounces for the bottom + laps (way too much), and 24 ounces for the deck (a bit too much, but OK for color work).

Despite the frustrating color problems, it's been a good weekend overall: Good surf each morning, and glassing the board each afternoon. Saturday morning the surf was almost like a small day in winter, overhead on the sets, glassy, and a peak to myself. Hard to complain.

In a few days my recent hedonistic surf lifestyle comes to an end, as I will join the rest of my family on vacation. That's good, I've started to miss them. This morning I spoke to my little son on the phone, and he just learned to say Daddy!

Finetuning the Shape: The Planer Knows Best

2009-06-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

This weekend I finished shaping board number two, and glassed the first two layers. Here are four pictures from the end of the shaping process. Before these pictures were taken, the tail was domed, and I was planning to leave it like that. But the stringer was sticking up a bit, and I wanted to save some time by trimming it with the planer... Carefully... Just a 1/32" of an inch... Chomp! The planer ate a piece of my tail - there was a huge gash. So then I was forced to reshape the tail, and now it's flat. Another way to put this, is that the planer knew better than me - There was no way it was gonna put up with that crazy domed tail!

Shaping Almost Done

2009-06-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

Turned the rails today. Still have to clean up the bottom part a bit more, and fine sand the whole board. Should be ready to start the glassing tomorrow.

Power Planing Pleasures

2009-06-22T21:24:00.000-07:00

Today I tried the power planer for the first time. What a difference to shaping by hand! At first I felt awkward and was very timid with the planer, but after a while I got more into it, and really mowed away at the foam.

At one point I noticed that there was a lot of dust in the air, like our own little private snowstorm in the backyard. I was surprised the vacuum system wasn't doing a better job. Then I realized that I'd forgotten to _turn on_ the vacuum... With the vacuum engaged, there was hardly any dust at all. The planer is pretty loud, however, so I suspect the neighbors may not be quite as thrilled about the planer as I am.

I planed the blank down to 2 & 6/8", a bit thicker than the target of 2 5/8". I figure the last 1/8" will be removed during final sanding after I shape the rails. In the pictures you see the blank after I finished planing + a rough sand job with 50 grit to remove the worst planer marks. You can still see some marks here and there, which I will clean up when I blend the rails.

This is going much faster than I expected. Later this week I will need to shape and blend the rails, sand smooth, and that's it for the shaping.

I hope to do the glassing this weekend, using 6 oz S glass for durability, with orange resin tint. I ordered epoxy and glass last night, so with some luck all the supplies will be here by the weekend.

Stoked!

Board Number Two Started

2009-06-22T00:58:00.000-07:00

Board number one took me six months to complete! This time around there are several factors that should drastically speed up my production: I am starting from a pre-shaped blank (rather than a block of insulation foam), I am using powertools, and my family is away on vacation. I hope to finish at least one board in the next two weeks, working only in the evening after my day job. If it goes faster than expected than I have materials ready to make more boards. We'll see...

Last time I created an enourmous amount of dust, and then our landlord happened to have a gardener come with a leafblower, who proceeded to blow all the dust over to our neighbour! The next day the neighbor complained that I was polluting her vegetable garden... This time I will do most of the shaping with the planer, and the dust is collected with a shop vac, hopefully my neighbour will be all smiles.

The first board will be a 6.5 x 19 " shortboard. In the 2nd picture you see the blank after I marked the template and cut the outline with a saw. The blank has 5" nose rocker and 2 1/8" tail rocker, and that's about what I want. So no rocker modification needed, which will simplify the shaping.

The next steps are mowing down the foam to desired thickness, and shaping the rails. To get accurate thickness measurements this time, I spent this morning creating the very high tech tool in the 3rd picture, following drawings in the incredible useful surfboard construction pdf that you can find at swaylocks.com.

That's it for today. More pics coming as the shaping progresses.

More Color

2009-06-16T23:21:00.000-07:00

I did a another testpanel with pigmented epoxy. Both pictures show the same panel, 2 layers of 6-ounce s-glass on top of styrofoam. The pigments used here are the same as in the previous post, but this time I used much lower concentration, and I also mixed pigements to create new colors. I like these colors much better than the ones in my previous post! But due to the lower pigment concentration, all these colors came out semi-transparent, and you can clearly see the grains of the styrofoam under the laminate.

From left to right in the bottom picture: Diluted ocre gave a real nice yellow, ocre and burnt sienna mixed gave a warm orange. Ocre and aquamarine mixed gave sea green. The fourth panel is a low concentration of aquamarine blue by itself, and the last panel is yellow ocre mixed with venitian red. I like these colors, and I think my favorite is the orange. I think I'm ready to do a whole board now, which color do you think I should use?

Surfboards Love Color

2009-05-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

I laminated some test-panels with tinted epoxy. I mixed up 1 1/2 ounces of epoxy, divided it into five smaller batches, and added pigment to each batch. The colors (from left to right) are: Burnt Sienna, Sienna, Yellow Ocre, Venitian Red, Ultramarine Blue.

I then laminated two test-panels that show the colors in the same order. Both panels have two layers of 6 oz s-glass. The first panel was EPS packaging foam.

The second test panel is polyiso insulation foam, sanded smooth to 100 grit.

The EPS test panel is clouded and muddy. That's just because I didn't clean my squeeque between each pass over the panel. For the polyiso panel, which I did second, I improved my technique, and it looks a lot cleaner - try clicking on the pictures to see a closeup. Good thing I practiced on some panels, before tinting a whole baord!

Note that in the blue and red areas, the small irregularities in the EPS foam surface are visible as dark specks. The sanded polyiso panel on the right looks much smoother. I guess this is why these colors are considered hard for resin tints. Yellow seems to show the imperfections in the foam much less. It makes sense that it's the color usually recommended for a first tint job.

I also tried swirling the colors together a bit. That mostly resulted in a brownish mess, with expeption of the blue, which I had poured first.

So I'll stay away from swirls for now... The colors on the polyiso panel came out much brighter and nicer than I had hoped for, I'm very happy with them. I chose these particular colors because they contain non-toxic pigments. I plan to do one more test where I mix yellow+blue to get green, and yellow+red to get orange. That's because almost all green and orange pigments you can buy off the shelf are toxic.

P.S: I stole the title for this post from the following wegpage: http://surfboardlove.blogspot.com/ check it out for some amazing colorwork!

Continuing Education: Blanks and Planer

2009-05-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

This will be a fun summer! I just bought my very first set of surfboard blanks, which I hope to turn into finished boards in the next months. I hope it'll be a lot less work than my insulation-foam-fish project... These blanks are all from Surfblanks America, from left to right: 6'8 shortboard blank, 7'8 shortboard/gun blank, and 6'8 fish blank. I hope to turn these into a thick and wide shortboard for smaller days, a solid gun for big Ocean Beach, and... the fish blank will be used for something experimental. Maybe a hull. I also want to experiment with color this time, I can't wait!!!

The blank distributor was a real friendly guy. He showed me his shop, including his new shaping room and computerized shaping machine. He strongly encouraged me to buy a planer, to save myself a lot of work with the shaping. I had always thought I would need to fork out $500+ for a refurbished Clark Planer, but after a bit of research on Swaylocks.com, I found that cheaper alternatives can work well. Also there are simple ways to connect a shop vac to the exhaust of the planer, to avoid all the foam dust. Which is good for me - the neighbour already complained when I hand shaped the first board. So I went out and bought a planer and shop vac today, very reasonably priced.

Just thinking about the planer makes me smile! It feel like I came to a fork in the road and made a decision that will influence my future in a significant and good way. My education as a backyard shaper is beginning.

p.S: I've had the insulation-foam-fish out twice since the repair, and so far it has held up, no more cracking in the deck.

Board #1 is done - again!

2009-05-01T12:35:00.001-07:00

I finally had time to fix the crack in the bamboo glass on the deck of board #1. First I consulted with the experts on swaylocks.com, which had different opinions about what could have gone wrong: one felt that polyiso foam was generally unsuitable for surfboards and that I should just trash the board (unthinkable after having put this much work into it!), another thought the deck lamination was too light, and another wrote that bamboo glass can be weak unless it is stretched just the right amount - stretch too little and the lam will be brittle - stretch too much and there'll be too little fiber. In the end I decided to route out a layer of foam around the crack, glued in a block of fresh foam with Gorilla Glue, sanded it level, and laminated over with two patches of bamboo glass.

At this point the ding was fixed, but the glue had left some nasty brown rings in the foam. It occurred to me that this was an excellent chance to add another logo to the board. You can see the result in the picture. Again I printed it on rice paper, and covered it with a 4-ounce e-glass patch.

Then, to make the board bullet-proof and hopefully avoid further cracks in the deck, I laminated a thick (2 layers of 6-ounce S-glass) patch over 2/3rd of the deck. If you click on the photo an view the closeup then you can see a reflection where the patch ends. I forget how much resin this took.

Then I faired out the patch and sanded the whole deck with #36, #60, and #100 grit sandpaper, then hotcoated the deck again (12 ounces of resin). This time I used a real wide brush which made the hotcoating real quick and easy. I few little things went wrong: Unfortunately I didn't have enough fast epoxy hardener left, so I had to use a mix of slow and hard, and it took many hours to cure the hotcoat - way too long. By that time plenty of dust had attached to the surface. I washed off the deck the next day - but the epoxy must have still been slightly tacky - after washing and drying the shine in the hoatcoat was gone. O well, I can do better on the next board... after waxing it won't really make a difference.

The board is a lot heavier now, but feels real solid. Like a tank.

So at this point the board is ready to ride again. The above happened two weeks ago, and the board has been curing away in the basement since then, while I've been travelling for work. I'm writing this from my hotel room, the day before flying back home. I can't wait to try the board real soon!

More pictures of the quad fish

2008-11-28T22:46:00.000-08:00

Here are some more pictures. I've noticed that surfboard photos taken up close, such as the one with me standing, or the picture of the fin area, tend to distort the true shape. The last two pictures here, taken from far above the board, give a good impression of the actual outline and shape.

I tried the fish once more, this time at a mellower, walled-up wave with room to turn. The board seems to turn well, and holds well in the face of the waves. I had never tried a quad before, and was pleaseantly surprised. Overall I love this board.

So now I am glad I skipped a bunch of steps in the construction that I was considering and don't seem to have affected performance negatively at all; I didn't make concaves, skipped sanding the hotcoat, skipped the glosscoat, didn't make a resin-dam to create a really sharp rail edge in the tail.

What about drawbacks?

The board feels a little heavy on land because the hotcoat is so thick and I didn't sand it. But that doesn't seem to matter in the water. In the water, maybe the nose area of the board is on the big side. That's part of the fish concept, but it might feel better with less volume. I'll have to surf the board more to make up my mind.

The main problem with the fish might be the thickness of the deck lamination (about 8-9 ounces of glass). During the second test session the board unfortunately ended up with a crack in the deck. I've asked for some advice on Swaylocks.com about that. Probably I didn't glass the deck thick enough, considering the light foam I used. So there's a chance I will need to add another glass layer to ensure the board will last a long time.

It may be a while until the next update, as the surf is really great this time of year, and mostly too big for this board anyway. So I'll take my time fixing it, and will instead surf a lot and start planning my next board project. That project will involve some cool color experimentation for sure :)

It's been a long but fun process to build my own board. After many late nights I'm really glad it's done. At the same time, I'm also stoked to build many more in the future!

Board #1 is done!

2008-11-28T22:11:00.000-08:00

Finally! Last week I finished the board! I hotcoated the bottom, sanded open the fin boxes, and added a bit more resin on around the boxes.

I finally took the board out at Ocean Beach on Saturday. In the morning the waves were a few feet overhead and rough, so I surfed a different board, but in the afternoon the waves softened and I gave the homemade fish a try. And to my big surprise - it surfed really well. I loved it!!! At first I didn't dare to duckdive it hard, and was affraid it would break any moment. But eventually I relaxed, made it out through the shorebreak. I only surfed 3 waves on it that day, but may main impression was that it was very fast, faster than the board I copied the template from! I think that may be because my copy ended up slighly bigger, since I shaped the foam to be the same size as laminated original, so that the lamination added extra volume. It seems that the extra volume works well for me. Also my bottom is more flat, while the original is double concave. Somehow it all adds up to a faster board, or at least that's how it feels. Amazing.

Board 1: Leashplug & Hotcoat

2008-11-12T23:55:00.000-08:00

I just sanded and hotcoated the top of the board, the resin's still dripping away in the backyard. To prep the surface I sanded with #36 in a few places, then #60, #100 everywhere. At the last #100 pass I sanded away the edge of the round logo.. Oops! Tried to fix the worst with a zig pen. Then wiped off the board with denatured alcohol, taped the rails, mixed 15 ounces of resin (just enough), poured it on and spread with a brush. Can't wait to see the dry result tomorrow morning!

Last week I put in a leashplug, and patched the missing cloth in the butcrack of the fish. I decided to put the leashplug in the stringer. Used a holesaw to get a smooth hole through the fiberglass, followed by router to get out the stringer underneath. Set the plug with resin thickened with bamboo dust. The dust results in a neat redish color, but also tons of airbubbles, so I'm not sure I would use it again.

board 1: Logos

2008-10-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

I designed two logos in Powerpoint, printed them onto rice paper, wet the paper with epoxy and laminated a piece of 4 ounces fiberglass on top. Used HP's faderesistant Vivera ink and RR BLUE epoxy w/ UV absorber, to protect the design from the sun. Printed color's came out bright and strong, and didn't run. Some small air bubbles trapped under the round logo, I think too late to fix now.

I bought the rice paper as a roll at Michael's - had to ask three different clerks, as the first two denied they had rice paper. The third clerk who came to my rescue turned out to be a graphic designer who was interested in painting surfboards!

Mixed up 1 1/2 ounces of resin, used about half. Used fast hardener this time, still plenty of time to work with but dry and hard to the touch an hour later.

board 1: Tail Patch

2008-10-07T21:06:00.000-07:00

I sanded down the resin and glass used to glue in the fin boxes, and laminated a tail patch over the bottom end of the board as shown in the picture. The green strips you see are just tape used to cover the box opening. This will come off when I sand open the boxes later on.

I used that V shape patch so as not to provide a line where the board is likely to break, but after posting a picture on swaylocks.com someone commented that there was still too much of a line. Hm...

The stretch lamination in combination with the future fins was very tricky, as the stretching of the cloth would produce a cloth tent over the protruding lips of the fin boxes. I had to use a lot of resin and massage the cloth around the boxes to make it stick down, and to get out all the air bubbles under the cloth. The result is ok - I got all the bubbles out - but not ideal, as some tenting remains. I may end up sanding into the cloth when opening up the boxes, making the fin area weak. So I'm considering another layer of reinforcement glass ("football patches") to be on the safe side.

Already forgot how much resin I used for this, 2 ounces?

board 1: Fin boxes are in

2008-09-21T21:03:00.001-07:00

I finished routing out the other slots for the fin boxes, and glued in the boxes. I roughed up the boxes with sandpaper, and wrapped a saturated sheet of 4-ounce fiberglass around each, then filled up the slots halfways with epoxy and pressed the boxes into place.

This was the trickiest part of the project, because the boxes go through the lapline into the rail, so that I had to route through several glass layers. Also the future fin boxes are really meant to go into the board before lamination. But it wasn't all bad: Having the lamination in place helped protect the board while I was messing around with the boxes.

Here you see what the tail area looks like now. The boxes are close to done, a bit more cleanup with sandpaper is needed.

Next I'll probably laminate a "butterfly" patch of bamboo glass over the whole tail area of the board, as Andrei suggested. I may even put smaller fin patches of 4-ounce fiberglass on top of that - I'm paranoid about the fins breaking out of the board on the first wave!

I'm also considering extending the patch over the whole bottom, which would make the board much more ding resistant, but also heavier. We'll see.

board 1: It's a quad fish!

2008-09-14T22:15:00.001-07:00

I decided on quad fins, using future fin boxes.

I agonized over fin placement, cant, and toe-in (the last two are the tilt and rotation of the fins) for a while. Finally I took measurements from various posts on Swaylocks.com.

The front pair will have 1/4" toe-in, the back pair no toe-in. The future fins have cant in the fin, as opposed to in the box, so you only need to worry about getting the box horizontal. The front pair of fins is located as follows: trailing edge of each fin is 1,5" from the rail, 12" from the tip of the fish tail. The back pair has trailing edge 2" from the rail and 6.5" from the tips of the fish tail.

These specifications also agree well with the twin keels on the original blue fish I'm copying. The two fins on each side of the quad basically replace one of the keels.

Today I marked the location of the boxes, and the areas to route out, and routed out one of the fin holes using the dremmel tool with a router attachment. It was slow, but not too difficult. The fin sits in there snuggly.

board 1: Second Deck Layer II

2008-09-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

Aloha. André is officially the first commentator of this blog! I'm stoked that someone is actually reading what I write here!

Below are some pictures of the board after that 2nd deck layer dried. The board looks more refined and finished now. It's hard to get a good perspective picture when the board is lying flat - the two middle pictures don't accurately show the real shape. The epoxy is hard to the touch but still malleable, even now, 18 hours after glassing. When it's fully hardened I'll flip the board on it's side in the rack, and take proper glamor shots.

Overall I'm really relieved and pleasantly surprised with how the lamination came out. There are some minor problems...

...there are small air bubbles along the the left pin-line (but not the right one for some reason.) These are probably due to the problems I had when I forgot to brush-coat this area with epoxy as part of the first deck layer lamination. Since these bubbles are small and now covered by two thick layers of glass, I'm tempted to just leave them alone.

...also I again had some problems with the center of the fish tail. This area is concave and hence the stretch glassing pulls the cloth off the board. I'll put a separate patch there before the hot coat. I learned today that you can stretchglass across concave areas by covering those areas with a water- or sand-filled ziplock bag. That'll force the cloth into the convave area, but apparently the zip log bag won't bond with the epoxy. I'll try that on the next board.

Well, well, well: The end is in sight! The remaining tasks are: sanding, fins, leashplug, and hotcoat.

I have to decide on the fins now - either quad boxes or wooden twin keel glass-ons. The quad boxes would be a departure from the design I'm copying, but they'd make the board more travel friendly. If I go for keels, then I'd also have to build or order them. I'm leaning toward quad boxes.

board 1: Second Deck Layer

2008-09-08T01:25:00.001-07:00

It's 1:30 am, and I'm dead tired after another midnight glassing session. Also it was my turn to get up early with Peter today, so it's been a long day.

Anyway, I just finished the 2nd layer of the deck lamination, and that was satisfying. This layer of glass goes over the whole deck and wraps around the rails, and thus hides the lap lines on the deck from the previous lamination layer. Most likely this is the last layer of the bamboo glass! Finally! There is a small chance I'll add a second bottom layer, as I'm a bit concerned about the fins breaking out of the board the very first time I ride it. That would be a major bummer, after all this work...

It took me 2 hours and 9 ounces of resin to saturate the lap lines and rails, then I mixed up another 18 ounces of resin and spent an hour glassing the deck. That was a bit more resin than really needed, and less than I spent on the first deck layer (9+21). That makes sense - the foam probably soaked up some of the resin when I did the first layer.

Here are some pictures from the preparation stages for now, more tomorrow when I can see the final result in daylight.

Sanding lap lines.

Stretching glass before lamination.

Mad Scientist?

board 1: First Deck Layer II

2008-09-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures taken the next day, after the deck lamination dried.

There is a small dent in one place, which I'll fill in before the next layer.

The fish tail was tricky, and I had to improvise a bit. I ended up cutting the cloth, leaving a small part of the foam uncovered for now. If you click on the closeup picture of the tail, you can get a good closeup view of what the bamboo cloth looks like after lamination. You can see that it looks all fuzzy, and it may almost seem like there are patches with too little resin to fully saturate the cloth. But those are just a lot of little bamboo fibers sticking up above the lamination. It's supposed to be like that, and you just have to sand the last layer before hotcoating.

The brown Elmer's glue discoloration near the nose (from gluing two foam pieces together when building the blank) turned into a rust-colored halo once I glassed over it. The Gorilla glue that I used to glue in the stringer isn't visible at all, so if I ever make my own blank again, it's Gorilla glue all the way.

board 1: First Deck Layer

2008-09-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

I spent last night glassing the deck. It took about 2 1/2 hours from when I mixed the first batch of resin until I was done and had cleaned up. I made the mistake of not saturating the cloth near the pinline and double-sided tape with a brush (as recommended in the Green Light video) first. As a result, there were a lot of air bubbles in that area when I was done glassing the deck, and I it took me a long time to fix that. I had to to mix up additional resin and squeeze out these air pockets one by one. Now I understand why they (Greenlight) recommend starting with the brushwork... I should have listened!

But the deck came out fine in the end. I spent about 18 ounces of resin on the deck, and another 1 1/2 to patch up the air bubbles. I probably could have used less resin by using the sequegee more. Oh well, I decided to focus on getting the bubbles out instead.

The pictures show the board at various stage: the double sided tape applied near the edge of the deck lamination, the glass stretched over the tape, and finally the board immediately after glassing, with the resin still wet.

board 1: Glassing Begins

2008-09-03T22:16:00.001-07:00

The 3-day weekend (Labor Day ) allowed me to finally start glassing board zero. That's because it gave me enough time to a) clean up the backyard to make wifey happy on Saturday b) bring a bunch of old crap to the salvation army on Sunday, making wifey even happier, and c) wifey was so happy that I could spend half of Labor Day glassing to my heart's desire.

The pictures show the board after I glassed the rails and bottom of the board. I used Bamboo glass from Greenlight Surf Supply with Resin Research Epoxy. I used the "stretch glassing" technique developed by greenlight, where you stretch the glass over double sided tape.

board 1: Shaping

2008-09-02T00:32:00.000-07:00

So I didn't fully manage to ignore the voice in my head: I did the shaping the hard way. I built a blank from scratch, and then shaped that. It all happened before this blog was born, but I documented it well here.

Board Zero

2008-09-01T23:57:00.000-07:00

I decided that the first board I would build would be a copy of a 6.1" Fineline twin keel fish in my quiver. I would pick the safest materials and production methods whenever there was a choice. It's the blue board in the photos blow.

Initially I was tempted to build the board of my dreams, i.e. build a "perfect board" both in terms of shape and looks. Complicated shape, resin swirls, fabric inlays, you name it.

Then I realized that for my first board I should keep it simple. One principle in science is to never change too many variables at the same time. I decided this approach would be wise here as well, and this is what led me to copy an existing board. This way I would learn how my choice of material and production method would affect the board, how my homemade board compared with one of similar shape made by an experienced shaper.

During the last weeks, I often heard a little voice that tempted me to deviate from my plan. One sentence I heard many times was: "Why not add some yellow resin tint? It's easy, and the board will look amazing!". Well the answer is that even a little resin tint can affect the curing of the resin. If I add the tint and the board breaks the first time I try it, then how do I know if it's the resin or something I else I did that was the problem?

In the end I was mostly able to resist the little voice, and stick with trying to replicate a proven shape, using a well-known construction technique. I told myself I could then experiment with shape, color, and other materials by changing one at a time in my subsequent board. (So I'll have to build many!)

Learning the Craft

2008-09-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

How do you learn to shape and glass a surf board?

I took the overly academic approach and did a ton of reading before starting. That lead me to almost bail on the whole project: For instance, I read on Swaylocks.com about a nasty incident of acute dermatitis from epoxy and fiberglass exposure... The warning labels for the chemicals used are several pages long... Carcinogenic ingredients in resins... Catalyst can cause blindness... Respirator required... The list goes on and on. In the end, what swayed me was the safety list in the book "Essential Surfing" by Gorge Obelian. The last item on the list, item 12, reads in capital letters: "Don't let all these safety requirements scare you out of working with fiberglass materials and resins. The experience can be rewarding if you are careful."

So I told myself to go ahead.

From Dream to Reality

2008-09-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

I've been addicted to surfing for a while now. I think most long time surfers eventually dream of building their own board. So did I. One day I decided the time had come, I would take my obsession with surfing to the next level. I started to build my first board. I'm starting this blog as I'm about halfway done.

It would get too tedious to recount all that has happened up to now, both with surfing and with building the first board. My approach in this blog will be to just give you a glimpse of what is going on every now and then, as well as my time allows. I will also use this blog to record details about surfing and board shaping that I want to keep track of, things like the effect of wind and swell on a certain surf spot, and mistakes that I do make when building boards. That way I can use these pages as a reference in the future.

But most of all I hope you'll enjoy reading this. Don't hesitate to post comments!