Sounds as though you’re heading to a padded paipo. There’s a bit on the 'net. Here’s one.
https://www.theseea.com/blogs/seeababes/diy-how-to-shape-a-wooden-paipo
Hey yall. Heres a pic of the tested materials
EPS foam (cut from 2’x8 sheet) (sucky quality…3lb density I think. But super cheap)
PE 2mm flooring underlay (green stuff)
Vinyl flooring (random test sample)
And posca paint marker…(wrting)
PL300 foam board adhesive
Thinking I’ll upgrade to thicker yoga mats, proper eps foam, and try find some nice clean white vinyl flooring for slick
Seems to make a super flexy and quite durable combo. Thinking I’ll make some hand boards for the prototype (less material) will post pics.
Thanks for all.your help and input guys!!
For the last 2 years, I have been playing with Body Board build tech.
I have been using XPS housing insulation – no significant absorption of water. I wouldn’t go below 25 psi min. compressive strength and 1.55 pcf density with XPS.
I have used a Walmart gym/excercise mat (0.4" thick) over shaped, unglassed XPS – quick bodyboard for the grandkids (3, 1" sheets glued together; 15 psi & 1.3 pcf). I used 3M 78 XPS/EPS adhesive (3 days curing for max. bond strength) for XPS sheets and the gym mat.
Currently, I am playing with 25 psi min comp strength (1.55 pcf) O-C Foamular 250. I perforate shaped foam surface with a modified Topflite Woodpecker tool, before glassing with FG/epoxy. EVA sup mat for deck pad. I sealed the shaped, peforated foam with a thin layer of epoxy resin first. Then I added FG cloth and epoxy after the seal coat had set. I will let the seal coat cure and then sand with 150 grit before adding the FG and epoxy next time.
Next test will be laying up a sheet of 2.5-oz FG cloth over a glass surface to create a thin sheet of FG/epoxy. Then bond that hardened thin sheet to the XPS deck with 3M 78 before glassing with epoxy and cloth in an attempt to further improve FG/XPS bonding.
For a smooth bottom surface, you might try ABS plastic sheet (maybe use 3M 78 adhesive) glued to polystyrene foam. Do some test panels before committing.
FTR this is all experimental still…
Great info here, guys. I’ve just recently been wondering how hard it would be to make a soft top surfboard for my daughter or even myself for fun.
Have been thinking about the same. Simplest approach might be an after-market conversion of a standard surfboard using SUP EVA.
https://www.hydroturf.com/category/sup-surf/sup-sheets/
BTW the simplest way to add a smooth surface to the bottom of a body board would be to add a layer of FG cloth/epoxy.
Hey all
Here are pics of the final product “prototype” board
Eva top
Eps core
HIPS bottom
Pl 300 glue
Worked good but didnt have good cutters, and the materials didn’t work too well with cleaning up edges with heat gun.
A little bit complicated for the kids I made them with, especially since I was teaching 9 kids at once, but do able nonetheless.
I would use a different glue, preferably clear in the future.
But overall makes a decent quality easy to make water proof board.
Hi Choa! I just came across a cool bodyboard that you tried to make. I am trying to do a similar thing and I was wondering if you experimented at all with trying to heat bond the HIPS to the EPS?
Wandering in after quite a while away and late on this-
A little history: Tom Morey essentially built the first ones out of scraps. Polyethylene foam billet stock. The core was polyethylene foam, same stuff used for shipping box inserts, cut with a hot wire rig. The surfaces were the skins of those extruded billets that had been cut off with the same hot wire rigs, and all glued together with contact cement, which was plenty good enough (the original boards flexed, which was the idea) and you could buy kits, precut core and skins that you would cut to size and stick on with contact cement you picked up at the hardware store.
And there’s no good reason you couldn’t use the same setup now. There was a company here, Packaging Industries, that figured they could build and sell their own bodyboards, being as they had and indeed manufactured the stuff. They folded some time ago, but these guys may be their successors.
https://newenglandfoam.com/foam/polyethylene/ - several different weights/densities
Hot wire cutter? A ‘C’ shape, cut out of plywood, a length of nichrome wire and a transformer to get the voltage down ( I used a doorbell transformer) , some appropriate sized wire and a dimmer switch or other rheostat. If you have or have access tto a Varistat, well, there you go. Do a search for nichrome wire sizes versus current, there were several calculators or tables for hobbyists. I looked it all up years ago but forgot them shortly after.
https://www.acehardware.com/search?query=contact+cement for your adhesive.
hope that’s of use
doc…
Good stuff doc. Glad to know you’re still around. When I lived on the Central Coast of Calif; Toobs was right up the El Camino Real in Morro Bay. When they got started they pretty much did the same. These days the Contact Cement is water based I belive. So should be no problems applying to any type of foam. The best one on the market is “WilsonArt” if you can find it. Not usually in the “Adhesives” department. It used to be back in the “Counter Tops/Formica” section of Home Depot.
Toobs still here. https://www.toobs.com/shop/
Welcome back Doc! I too am glad to know you’re still around.
PS - please check out “Our Story” part… CLASSIC!
John,
Thanks for the Toobs link. As you said, “Our Story” is classic.
@ doc
You’ve had some classic posts at Sways in the past.
I hope there are more to come.
Bill
Yes John, thanks for the link. I was always impressed that something like Toobs could originate on the Central Coast. Spontaneous originality.
doubled up
I’m gonna put multiple replies here in one, to save innocent electrons from a horrible fate…anyhow-
Hmm- I hadn’t thought about Formica cement as formica cement, used it a lot doing countertops of course, Useful stuff, and the reason I first bought an organic vapor mask. Newer water based I haven’t played with, which kinda shows how long it’s been since I was doing a lot of carpentry. Though I think I’d still use a mask. Lung damage is additive.
Next- loved the Tooibs story. I find myself thinking ‘yeah, these are my kind of people’. They mentioned BZ boards, and yeah, that was the Packaging Industries house brand. Apologies for my sometimes toasted memory. Produced here on Cape Cod at first.We used to go to the factory/warehouse and come back with a zillion of the things shrink wrapped into a very unstable ziggurat on the top of a Dodge station wagon. What we got away with, back in the day. Sold a zillion oif the things, factory seconds, cheap.
There’s some things they ( the Toobs guys) mention I’d like to expand on and may well morph into new and twisted topics. Apologies in advance…
So- something mentioned in the Toobs story is having access to a machine shop, when you need to make tooling for instance. The cliche ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail’ or similar is good, when you have access to more tools and processes your horizons really open up. .A cousin of mine ran into that. He was a gunsmith, with the truly lovely machine tools, lathes and mills and more that they have. But then…he did something really cool. He learned P-code and started using CAD/CAM to do small production runs, not limited to gun parts by any means. He has a one man factory, really. I love it.
So, my first schism= what is in your dream shop? what tools would you have, what processes could it do?
Which leads me to a second topic-as an aside, I help teach a class which includes this sort of thing, pardon my ranting and raving.
Production levels, also mentioned in the Toobs story. Ifr, lets say, you’re doing single digit numbers, break out the chisels, the files, handmake everything. The surfboard ‘industry’ really isn’t, it involves a whole lot of hand labor, hopefully skilled labor, at many if not all the stages. Everything is in some ways done at this low-number prototype level. The cool thing at this stage is skill, hand skills.Artisanry. And labor costs are very much reflected in a relatively high product price.
But - economies of scale bite ya. Like the Toobs guys buying foam. You can’t really do billets or rolls of foam at the artisan level- Gordon Clark did something building blanks on the artisan level, but that’s by very clever design and process evolution a special case. That aside, lets call this small scale production: tens or hunreds or low thousands. Mechanization becomes important. Labor saved is very importqant, as is economy of materials. CAD/CAM rocks here. And a number of other processes. Typically, you’re utilising existing tools with jigs and fixtures and so on to do this. Quality of the product isn’t dependant on hand skills, it’s in the way the tooling is set up.
And then, you get into really big numbers, hundreds of thousands of the same thing. Stamping them out in a factory like car fenders or for that matter flat metal washers. Kachoonk kachoonk kachoonk. Little or no variety. Material economy, or recycling scrap is important, as is production quality - you can’t afford to have a large percentage of flawed items between inspection costs and additional production. Specialised, one off tooling/machinery. And you don’t build this sort of thing (like making foam rolls) for making one or two, it’s economically prohibitive.
Boring as all hell to actually do it…but the cool thing at this level and at the smaller scale production level is designing the production method. At this scale, how you set up your Great Big Factory, at the smaller level how you adapt what you have to making your dinguses in numbers.
But before I wander off point here, my second question** Can the surfcraft biz ever go beyond the artisan level? Should it? How?**
and on that note, here we go, right? I’m back, and we may all regret it.
doc…
I think there are two critical dimensions here. Prototyping and manufacturing.
Prior to modern tech (computers, CNC, 3D printing etc.). Design evolution was tedious an slow.
With computers and simple 2D CAD programs alone, I am able generate designs and precise curves in days vs. years. Further, CNC allows rapid prototyping and testing, enabling adaptive modification from field inputs in hours to days.
Manufacturing on a large (economies of) scale poses challenges from there.
Those gifted with computer and CNC skills can compete effectively at the artisanal level with their designs in addition to staying out in front of the big commercial dogs.
IMO artificial intelligence is the mind-computer interface, opening a new realm of potential creativity that allows rapid design evolution.
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Hi doc - I don’t know if ‘The Biz’ should go beyond the artisan level. In many ways perhaps it has? I know that a guy like Ryan Burch makes boards for the Hansen shop in Encinitas and even at premium price levels, they can’t keep 'em in stock.
Excellent points. I might also add that with CAD/CAM you have some cool things going on.
First off, you have very good reproducibility, I’ll call it - wonder if that’s an actual word. If you used CAD/CAM tooling to make one, you can then make another- or a hundred exactly like it. Within machine tolerances, not by eyeball-good guess. This is important. By comparison, let’s take Phil Becker. He could do production wonderfully well, consistently well. But even for him, there were inescapable variations, maybe not all intentional. The customer wants something just like the X he had, or saw, or tried.Or a lot like the X, but just a little different…
That takes us to intentional variation. Say you want to mess with the design: Make it a millinmeter wider here, a skosh narrower there, to see what it does. This is also important. How we learn things. CAD/CAM is cool like that too.
Now, I’m gonna call this stage or level agile manufacturing. Reproducible yet easily changed, variable by intent and not serendipity or accident, yet there are economies of scale there. It’s the new paradigm . In a lot of ways I think it’s the future. So many nice things about it, ease and speed of delivery to begin with. Identical or ‘custom’ is easy.
AI- wow, that’s a whole other thing. I’m thinking that you mean the design process advised by computer tools, say hydrodynamics modelling?
I’m going to use America’s Cup boats as an example here. Unlike surfcraft, you can’t bang out a test model for a relatively cheap price to tank test. Or, modelling an aircraft in a wind tunnel to get lift and drag numbers. The America’s Cup boats , modelling used Cray supercomputers to model waterflow using a whole lot, maybe millions, of '‘packets’ of fluid going along the hull. Based on a lot of assumptions- and I think they still tank tested models. Modelling fluids in simple conditions is hard. Modelling them in the 3D conditions of a wave face - wow.
Right now, empirical testing of individual models is it. I don’t think the surf biz can produce enough spare cash to finance the basic theoretical research. Even tank testing, standing waves are pricy to make. The America’s Cup boats are something else, projects for billionaires.They throw crazy money at those.
Although computing power is getting cheaper, Moore’s Law, And ideally an AI learns. Test, learn, test, learn - and narrowing in on a theory of what works and why.
Given the raw materials, blank, glass, resin, you can make a surfboard with little more than sandpaper and patience. And that, or working with hand tools, will always be there. But, where is it gonna go? We live in interesting times.
doc…
I am referring to that which preceded the current perception of AI.
I’m talking about augmentation of the human mind. The computer allows the individual to create beyond their actual skill level. For example, in my case, with simple hand-measured data sets, I can almost effortlessly generate a polynomial equation for a nice clean curve with high correlation (R^2 = 0.998) using common PC software. This allows me to calculate data points at any length intervals I choose. I can replicate a template with high precision and accuracy using a calculator or any shaping software. From there, using that same root equation, I can unlock aspect ratios to simply change dimensions.
Another simple example would be instantly creating and printing ellipses of any dimension.
With augmented intelligence, you can take a basic grasp of a concept and expand it beyond an individual’s actual mechanical/intellectual skill level.
AI and computational fluid dynamics are several levels beyond what I meant.
Hi John- I think the artisan level will always be there, though necessarily at a premium price. Either as collectible toys for the rich or as absolutely prized possesions of those who have the need or desire for something at that level.In the same way that, oh, Korth revolvers or Steinway pianos or Morgan cars are still viable. I have a buddy who made longbows, gorgeous things. Another friend who does custom bicycle frames.
But, for the rest of us? The working man, lets say, or the beginner? That’s the bulk of the market. And they don’t need the high end custom, nor do they want to ( or can they) pay that premium price.
Lets take, oh, something I do a lot of, and enjoy doing. Cutting upan onion. I like to eat and as a result of being on the bottom of the US economic spectrum, I do most of my own cooking. I really like cooking, in fact. So lets break out that Vidalia and have at it. But what with?
I can buy a truly gorgeous custom hand made kitchen knife, perfectly balanced, Damascus steel etched to bring out the beauty. Thousands of dollars. And they are beautiful. If I want to take the time and set up to do it, i could forge and grind and heat treat and polish my own. I trained at that, a bit, in my younger days. Though even at my lowly pay scale, that’s some serious investment. They work really, really well. But that kind of money, I’d be living on ramen for a long time, and that doesn’t need much in the way of knife skills.
Or, I can buy a Shun, or a Global. Lovely things as well, though maybe not the pride of ownership. But I’m not a celebrity chef, I’m a good cook, I hope. Variations, a Sabatier carbon steel knife, or a German pattern Tramontina made in Brazil. They all handle a bit different, a good cook can pick out the differences and pick what they like. They are all production knives, made to a pattern with not that much hand finishing. And if I want a Global Gwhatever model Santoku just like the last one, I can get it. Two hundred-ish American dollars or less.
I don’t own a Shun, Not crazy about them. But I do have Globals, Sabatiers and Tramontinas. I really like cooking. And every now and then I indulge myself. Relatively affordable. I go from using the Globals to the Sabatiers to the Tramontinas because eometimes I like to use the qualities of one, sometimes the other. I used the Globals as a prep cook.
But I also have a stamped 15 dollar Dexter Russel. The line cook’s friend. And in all honesty, except for a few very special tasks ( sashimi, for instance) , I can’t really justify not just having that one on a utilitarian, functional level. Just, I like having the others. But I don’t take them on catering gigs…
doc…