Surfing Board 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!