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?