This is the first airbrushed blank I’ve glassed and I was noticing that grinding down the freelap junk seemed a whole lot more tricky with avoiding the paint. It seemed like painting a little strip of resin from the lap edge out onto the blank would sort of help protect the blank before sanding it a bit and glassing the deck. Is this what basting means?
Mitchell,
Yes - you got it exactly right…
Best,
HerbB
You have it right.Be sure to use lam resin with no wax added.It is a very common mistake not too often mentioned.Have fun. RB
Howzit Mitchell, The trick is to squeegee the extra lam resin past the laps on to the foam when wrapping the rails. That is if you are doing a free lap lamination. This is how I do it so I don't add the extra step of going back after I lam the board, killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Aloha,Kokua
I have found that grinding down that edge is the hardest part of the process. Why use lam resin instead of filler. very intrested to find out.
Thats a good question.Maybe I can clarify my answer a bit.When I mentioned the use of lam resin I was speaking of the freelap that goes to the deck before the bottom is glassed.Kokua is right and he is a pro,guys like him make it look easy. However I have found that for the beginners I have tought, basting over the foam makes it a bit easier to clean things up without gouging the foam(especially if it has airbrush color).If you use hotcoat resin at this point you have the wax situation which may cause a problem when you glass the deck.Basting the bottom lap is best done with hotcoat resin.You can sand the lap mess down before doing the final hotcoat.If done right you will not expose any weave.Actually when I hotcoat the deck I dont tape it and paint up and under the lap so I kill two birds with one stone.Last thing is to flip the board…grind the lap…and tape it off and hotcoat.There are lots of ways of glassing.I try to answer these posts with the beginner in mind.I hope this helped.(As for filler I have never used it)Have fun. RB
cleanlines, in Australia, to clarify further , what americans call ‘hotcoat’ is called ‘filler’ resin here . So, without realising it, you have , indeed , used filler !!
[you probably say “filler” for what we call “q-cell,” * yes ?]
- that’s foam ground fine, mix it with resin to fill deep dings
[ah, the language barrier… imagine how hard it must be being japanese, for instance, and making boards half the year in america and half the year in australia !!]
ben
Cheers Chipfish.So you guys call hotcoat resin “filler resin”?Language is funny.In England they call clamps “cramps”.I call things such as Qcell and Cabosil “filler”.It is used to thicken resin for dings etc.I have never added it to resin for hotcoating though.I would relly like to visit Australia some day. RB
Chipfish…one more thing.I lived in Japan for three years.My Dad was US Air Force.We lived in a town called Tachikawa.I climbed mount Fuji.camped at Nikko and rode the trains all over the place.We were just kids and did not speak any Japanese.I still am amazed at how friendly and helpfull the Japanese people were when we got lost. RB
Herb, Kokua, Cleanlines, everyone: THANKS! 5th board I’ve made, first airbrushed…The glassing came out fine. I can’t imagine how much flatter the learning curve would be without all of the assists. Also, how about this…
The guy who helped me airbrush the blank was a local shaper named John Riordan who makes Wetstix Surfboards near Bethany Beach, Delaware. The guy’s made like 600 boards over the last 20 years and I’d never even met him before but he welcomed me into his shop after I called hime through a mutual friend and he basically showed this novice how to airbrush. Not do it for me but let me practice on a sheet of plywood then use his equipment to do it. Sure it looks funky but in those two hours, I learned something completely new.
And Jon Ashton, another longtime shaper out of Berlin MD, has been so generous with advice and even gave me old O’fishl router bits and a jig he no longer uses when I told him how much trouble I was having installing futures boxes freehand with a dremel tool.
True generosity. Pure stoke from guys in the business for decades…