All you homemade EPS blank makers out there.

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My question is: How in the world are you getting decent shapes, when you haven’t even perfected shaping the Clark foam blank.(or maybe you have) . I mean something that is 95% pro quality. Clark gives you all the profiles, and it’s still easy to screw up. I’d like to see some close up pictures of the EPS’ers

Show me your boards!!

Bert & Greg’s boards don’t count.

-Jay

Jay,

I have not hot wire cut yet; I did the HD glue up. used blocks to approximate a rocker out of the clark catalog.

But having seen it done, if you hot wire the blank with a rocker template you have zero skinning, zero thickness adjustment and zero rocker adjustment. Sure there is a little more work inshaping/foiling the rails as you start with a totally flat deck and bottom, but it seems to me that no skinning, no thickness adjustment and no rocker adjustment means your starting with closer to finish product and it should actually be easier than using a clark blank. As for rocker templates, I’m pulling mine from the clark catalog and/or profile photos off the web as a starting point. Adjusting to desire thickness on paper and then will be cutting to finished rocker/thickness.

As for showing boards and not counting Bert and Greg’s what about MrJ, Sab, mecrafty, markvy, benny1… and many more. Looks like they are getting boards as good or better than what you can get off the rack + lighter and more durable.

I’ll post mine when I finally get around to it also. I’m on the EPS train, just the slow train because of the rest of life too.

ps. thanks again for your glassing seminar at Keiths a year and a half ago. You guys gave me the confidence to jump in. On the final hot coat of another board and thought about what you and kieth showed/did as I went through it again.

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Great stuff here.. so what is the ideal weight of foam for EPS? The 1.# stuff feels way way to soft to me. I was at Star Foam here in Vista and I checked out what they had to offer. To me 2# felt and looked to be the best for building boards.

At the Cerittos event, Greg said he perferred the 1.5 or 2# over the 1# but it all works. 1# is fine but needs a lot of glass. There are a couple post (including the resource section) were Greg gives glassing guidelines for different weight eps.

for 1# he recommended 2x6oz bottom 3x6oz deck; don’t remember the rest.

if your doing the sandwich then your strength is in the skin on the blank and you don’t need as much glass.

Okay here’s a photo portfolio of a day in the life of a cheapo EPS board maker who never made really a board since '71 prior to discovering sways and meeting CMP last december…

I apologize for the level of workmanship as they were all pretty much shaped in the driveway using a belt sander instead of a planer… Poor lighting and working on a slope in the hot sun sucks…

Here’s the cheapo Lowes $15.00 slab method.

Went little crazy and bought 4 sheets of 2", 4 sheets of 1" and 4 sheets of Bamboo Veneer and did this…

All these 1lb real cheapo Lowes blanks(way worse than Homedepot foam) became these…

Then I got wise and discovered Jim Richardson’s molded 1.4lb and 1.8lb EPS blanks.

This is day one(sat) - Buy the blank clean it up or reshape it like this with or with out stringers

Bought some fancy wood for the skin (long Sapele, long Purpleheart, koa, rosewood, ebony, cedar, birch, mahogany)

Day 1 or 2 - Cut out and tape up your top and bottom wood skins

Bottom (birch/purpleheart)

Top (bamboo/purpleheart)

Day 2 and day 3 Vacuum Lam using 4oz or 6oz E cloth (Restored 1958 Austin Healy 3000 as a table)

After 10-12 hours spend another couple pealing off the green and blue tape till you finger nails bleed.

Day 4 (Tues) Spend the evening sanding everything smooth then patch patch patch patch and resand then glue on nose and tail blocks

Day 5 - Glass top bottom

Day 6 - Sand laps and hot coat top put on fins and hot coat bottom

Day 7 - sand and seal coat top and bottom with LP

If you just clean off the mold marks and use balsa instead of hardwood it’s sooo much easier…

Here’s one with almost zero shaping effort… We showed it to Jim and Jeff

All the finished boards above have been test driven with positive results…

Notice no valves

And yes, you don’t have to use wood.

Jeff Johnston doesn’t he just glasses them clear no tint and 4lbs max…

I don’t know if any of this helps but chipper says pictures are way better than words…

$15 for a 4"x24"x96" blank…

you can’t go wrong just give it a go! (imua…lanakila)

First board ever (for me, of course):



Time…

Can an expert Home Depot/eps/hot wire/Cerritos college guy shape a blank faster and better than a

Expert Clark foam/power planner/poly polluter ?

Just shaping time ,not glassing time, not a debate over which is better.

Now that you have your board shaped how much time will it take to glass it ?

I’m curious. I’m not taking sides or making judgments.

Ray

10 - 20 min hotwire cutter

then shape the rails i guess anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half

sandwhich skins take me 14 to 20 hrs to finish complete with fins etc

straight glassing would be same time as a pupe

long waits while curing though

but the advantages far outweigh the wait times.

i guess if iwas serious id get my rockers and tables cut on cnc from cad files

but we just made up 2 templates and spent a few hours cutting out some blanks

u can press those foils into any rocker u want really

once your setup its real easy

i know im not a very good shaper but i can manage the rails no probs cause ive done a bit of wood carving and other works.

the rocker table is the key though

i can press any old bit of foam into a profile with my existing table templates

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Can an expert Home Depot/eps/hot wire/Cerritos college guy shape a blank faster and better than a

Expert Clark foam/power planner/poly polluter ?

Now that you have your board shaped how much time will it take to glass it ?

I’m by no means an expert, but I’d say to get the same finnish on a PU blank as an EPS blank, the PU is alot faster. Although you don’t need to skin an EPS blank and the rocker can be made 100% custom so no need to adjust it, the deck is usally flat rail to rail so it will take more time to get a nice roll to it. I’d guesstimate that to about half an hour to an hour for a good shaper.

To get a finnish similar to PU on an EPS blank, you need to seal it in one way or another. This adds time. Or, you can go with an opaque lam and a little extra weight and no extra time.

As for glassing, pretty much the same time used when laminating. Epoxy takes a longer time to cure, so it takes some time before you can hit it with a sander, but in the meantime you can glass the other board you have waiting.

regards,

Håvard

I’m on board #8 EPS/epoxy right now. I started the ‘$14 Blank’ thread just over 1 year ago. I’ve gone through Home Depot Blanks, Insulfoam 1# billets as cores for sandwiches, hotwiring, and now I’ve graduated to 2# blocks. Next step will probably be sending a CAD file to Bay Foam to have a 2# blank CNC cut to rocker & template, then all I’ll have to do is rails, concaves, etc.

I’ve actually found an easier way to get ‘close tolerance’ than hotwiring. Maybe its just me, and the hotwiring is neat & kind of mad scientist, but it bugs me. My wires break a lot, I don’t like the burning smell and I find the bare wire a little scary.

So, first thing, I make a rocker/thickness template out of masonite. 1/4" bigger on thicnkess than I want for final.

I split the blank into 4 pieces, 6" wide each. Draw out the template on the side. You can draw it flat (rockerless, mostly), if you want to fit it all inside a 3" thick piece of foam, for example, and bend in the rocker later with a stringer or with skins while its in the bag. Then I cut the thing on the bandsaw. Glue the 4 pieces together, with or without stringers, with expanding polyurethane (Gorilla type) glue. Then template, skin, and shape like any blank. The 3 glue lines stiffen up the EPS enough for shaping. Otherwise, you just can’t shape it too well because the EPS (1# especially, but 2# also if its thin) is so floppy.

The glassing is easy. Just like any glassing, only longer work time & longer cure time. But I just figured out a better system on this board (I think), to get better chemical bonding (within 24 hours) for my hotcoats.

I laminated the bottom at night & hotcoated it the next morning. It was set up enough to run a piece of 233+ around the rail for the drips. The hotcoat stayed on the lam much better - no run outs on the rails, no voids from separation - even though I did it thinner than usual. Next day, I flipped it to surform the laps and the tape line. Then I’ll laminate the deck & hotcoat it too just like I did the bottom. I will have to sand down the hotcoat around the bottom of the rails to get a good bond on my deck laps. And the deck laps (around onto the bottom) may have to be hotcoated separately later too, but I’ve just never liked that the bottom hotcoat in a normal lam bottom-flip-lam top-hotcoat top-flip-hotcoat bottom schedule is a mechanical bond only because its so much later

I’ll post some photos of making a blank. This one was a longboard with 3 x 1/2" d-cell stringers.

Laying out the rocker (the photo makes it look wonky - it didn’t really have such a bend point):

Cutting it on the bandsaw (you could do this with a hotwire too, but you’d need 2 guides )

And gluing it up with the d-cell

next post…



Making ‘close tolerance’ EPS blanks, part 2

Out of the clamps:

Skinning the bottom:

Templating:



Making ‘close tolerance’ EPS blanks, part 3

Template cut & deck skinned. Pretty nice blank, from a cheap block of 1#…

Hey Jase

You probably can, but I wouldn’t recommend it, Forget poly its not worth it with timber/veneer for many reasons. Marineware (Southampton 02380330208) will sell you a kilo of sp115 for about £20.00, if you buy 5 kilo, drops to about £15 a kilo. 1 kilo is enough to do a 6ft board incl filler coats and fins. I dont think you could do a poly with only a kilo.

Hope this helps

oneula…

Sorry it took so long to return your post, but the “day job” keeps me busy! As for the web page…should not be down. I didn’t want to make this an advertisement…anyway the web is www.segwaycomposites.com

The Parabolic Stringer blanks are in limited production for now due to the Emmy show. After the show, I should be able to kick up the blank production. The planned rocker template will be based on both the Greg Loehr templates of the 02 and 04 series. As for the cost… will be some where in the $150 to $170 range and shipping will be extra. Still working out some of the details.

While I’m here, let me explain what is going on with this Emmy stuff. I was approached by Esquire Mag. about an article they were doing on surfing. They wanted to put a high end surfboard in the article, and contacted Surfer Mag. for info. Jake Howard, (Thanks Jake!!) at Surfer gave them my name, and it went from there. Anyway, after the Esquire Mag. came out, two days later I received a call from the PR company that does the Emmy’s, and they wanted me to display at the “Style Lounge” which is a boutique for the celebrities prior to the Emmy Awards. We opted to do the display, all at the last minute, and its been arses and elbows ever since. Don’t know where it will go, but if you never try, you’ll never know!

Maybe I’ll post an update after the show…

ALSO… Oneula Great boards!!

Benny1 too!!!

Thanks!

Ken

We glasesd boards that were covered in D-Cell years ago with poly and they came out heavy. Epoxy makes a much lighter lamination even with the same glass schedule.

i have shaped 2 boards the eps way and finished them all the way to riding stage. i have made a fiew just for practice and never glassed them, when you think about it all you are out is 25 bucks or so. and you can make two boards. i have pitched a few and some are just sitting around.

but its probably the most practical way of getting some numbers without spending a lot of money.

both ways are good but i think i like clark a little better right now. and although there is a significant price difference it isnt that bad.

Hey Mark,

I had no idea that there was so much difference in the amounts needed. That makes epoxy almost as cheap to use. I used over three kilos of poly on my last hollow wooden. Is the difference due to wastage or different application methods? I’ve not used epoxy befrore but I’ll be ringing Marineware as soon as I’ve finished my latest board (already got the resin for this one).

Thanks loads

Jase (MMM)

When you talk about skinning the EPS, do you mean you use a bet sander? I thought a planer would cause the EPS to come up in chunks.

Thanks.

Ki

a planer will work just fine even on 1# EPS, just cut (push/walk) slowly.

If you cut too fast it will rip but so does a Clark blank.

A surform with a micro-blade screen works well as well (available at foam-ez, I love mine).

Just curious but why even use 1# when there is EPS in 2#. With the 1# EPS you have to use more cloth and epoxy to just make a board that will last longer than a week…

Why would you need to skin a EPS home made blank?? shaping yes… usually skinning the blank refers to taking off the protective painted hard outer most surface of a Clark blank… Last I checked beer coolers don’t need skinned… :wink:

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why even use 1# when there is EPS in 2#. With the 1# EPS you have to use more cloth and epoxy to just make a board that will last longer than a week…

if i wasnt doing sandwhich balsa skins

i would use 2 #

but 1 # is lighter and more flexi

if you are using sandwhich skins u only need light glass job.

sabs is doing boards @ under 4 pounds total weight

i guess thats the reason to use 1 pound eps

i made one 1kg lighter than a standard shortboard and it is close to unbreakable and very hard to ding.

i guess if u used 2# on a sandwhich skin it would add a few hundred grams

i will try 2 # and compare them

Jase

Chiefly different application method, I use a roller compared to a squeegee (with poly), then weigh out your cloth and try to keep your resin amount to a similar weight. Loads in the archives about epoxy lam technique. Good luck