Gracias Kachuna grande. Moy bueno.
By the way; Ten years ago Or there about Polyester did hit $1300 per 55 gallon drum.
Would be cool if someone with insight in the industry or better the chemistry replied… Just for educational purposes.I tried to think it through, but I guess I’m way too undereducated to get to a valuable point. It seems that there is a wide variety of matter that goes under the subtitle epoxies…
I don’t think it’s only the resin that gets modified.
Curing time for example…
Many systems use the same resin with different hardeners to get fast or slow curing.
UV stability, viscosity, surface quality etc is in the resin, but those things seem to be just additives that have nothing to do with the chemical reaction that is the initial curing.
I remember someone saying on a trade show that all the basic resin on the globe is manufactured by a handful of big factories, but don’t know if that was reliable source.
Where is Greg Loehr…
Read my post further on regarding Part A vs. Part B. You don’t have to be “educated” to understand simple “Supply and Demand”. I am pretty sure that how fast a harder (Part B) sets is relative to the percentage of active ingredient. More=faster. Less=slower. So hardeners are most likely generic and not customized. Contributing factors would be COVID-19, dependency upon foreign resources, labor shortages, and the simple fact that there is pent up demand.
I hear what you say, but don’t get it.
Epoxy is said to be different from poly resin, where more is faster acting as a catalyst.
With epoxy more is just worse, not faster.
From what I know all epoxies resins are more or less same base ingredients with additives. Resin producers make their cook. Base is reaction of bisphenol A or F with epichloridrine thanks to an amine, there is many kind of amine. Additives are for UV stability, elongation to brake/stiffness/strengh modification, viscosity… For example I add propylene glycol and benzyl alcool in my resin that increase elongation to break, reduce viscosity, tg and stiffness. I have some connected to epoxy function that react with main system so I can add more with less impact on tg and more visco and flex but harder to find and higher cost.
When Covid hit everyone screamed that they shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t work from home. OMG, who would possibly enjoy not getting up early, not commuting to the inner city office with the hordes, not dealing with office politics, traffic issues and petrol prices.
Yesterday I heard that 40% of job applicants wouldn’t work for a company that won’t let them work from home. And a lot of ‘work from home’ people aren’t even getting out of bed to do work. Drag that laptop over here and I’ll do my work while I watch Netflix for the next 8 hours.
Same with petrol, they made it too expensive and now there’s a race to develop E vehicles and once there’s a good range of E-vehicles on the market, who the hell would bother going back to get screwed at the bowser ?
Moral to the story is that when things change, initially there’s chaos, i.e. Clark foam, but after a period people will accept that standard resins are too financially, environmentally and morally expensive and embrace more bio/ green alternatives and never go back.
By constantly upping the price, they’ve shot themselves in the dick.
Mr Ultimats , I would very much like to see the self dick shooting , looking to the future , with surfboard building now a multi billion dollar industry I predict that the giant company,s will move away from hand laminating boards ( because cheap labor is still more expensive than machines and will go the same way as shaping has ) maybe some kind of shrink wrap that will not use resin , and then the only people that will need the resin will be Swaylockers : )
So many people on this website were saying the same thing ten years ago; “embrace more bio/green alternatives and never look back.”. Still waiting for that to happen. These 4x4, diesel guzzling, loud straight six inch boys up here in the Northwest are not gonna give up those Dodges, Fords and Chevys for a quiet puny little electric. May get you from 0–60 in 2 seconds, but won’t pulll a fallen tree out of the middle of the road. Ten months ago the U S was energy independent and had the cleanest air and water of any developed country on Earth. Same old “greenie weenie” $#!t
They don’t call tornadoes, tornadoes any more as they whip thru the “wetlands of Nevada”. Everything is going up $$ wise, but only because of current administration policies. Crisis to Crisis. I wonder how much “Super Sap”:will Go up? Are they still even in business?
the rednecks where I live ain’t never gonna give up their Tonka Toy lifted diesel pukers until the penalty price tag on the fuel forces them to.
Gotta turn off the oil tap getting sent through the tail pipes, however…need to keep diminishing oil reserves for plastics…no oil, no plastics, no consumer goods
Eventually, the price of resins will go high and stay high simply because at some point the demand for it will dramatially shrink, and less demand = smaller production and higher prices…reason being CNC production is on the near horizon and it will be a game changer for so many products currently made offshore.
CNC will eventually service the consumer side of the surfboard biz, selling to the 35 million surfers clogging the lineups around the globe. Buy their fave pro model on Amazon, sent to the local CNC hub where it’s fabricated from raw polymers…shaper gets paid for his shaping algorithm, not much different than a book sale, Amazon takes their slice, CNC get’s paid, brown truck drops off at the front door…
Will always be a custom market, however, for those who consider surfing more than just the act of standing on a board…and those boards will cost more than ever…and should
Yes I envision a production line where blanks are pre shaped to order any size you like , and they slide off the production line into skins like giant condoms ( must be a joke there somewhere , blanks and condoms ) then heat shrunk onto the blanks and out the door untouched by human hands . its just a commodity , kind of like condoms . of course condoms would not be of any use to the oil guy who shot his dick off .
About 12 years ago I saw a great thermoplastic skinned board by Greg Clough of Aloha. He blew a high tolerance tight cell Styrofoam blank and then it went into a 2 piece concrete coffin where the thermoskins were vacced onto the blank joined at the rail apex all around. Fucking indestructible. He tried to get the local Surf Lifesaving Association to swap from old polyester resin craft that spent most of their lives being repaired, he organised a meeting and threw one of his boards down 40 concrete stairs without a scratch. Almost.
The dinosaurs said no because they had a long time handshake agreement with a local Board maker. So despite the financial gain of less repairs, less down time and quicker manufacture Greg’s smarter, environmentally better business didn’t flourish.
The moral here is that even if the new idea is much better , makes money and environmental sense, it can still fail because dopey people will always be able to say Nah.
It’s how hard shell bic boards are made. They don’t call it a condom but a socks.i
A molded foam in an fiber impregnated socks with plastic sheet up and harden in a mold.
Other companies do it too.
NAH.