Since EPS doesn’t expand, isn’t it safe to assume that I can have a blank made in a finished mold, no shaping necessary?
So, in other words, if a board I like is scanned, can it be made in EPS right out of the machine, or does it have to be hotwired from a rectangular chunk?
Does that make sense?
Since beer coolers and other EPS foam products seem to be exact, why not a surfboard? No need to shape if you simply make a mold using a board you already shaped. If it’s a magic shape, it’s done, and seems like there would be no need to even finish sand/shape. Just pop it out of the mold and glass it.
Seems possible but not feasible. You’d have to have a custom mold for every shape…and good luck finding an EPS supplier that will let you use a custom mold for one board…maybe if you committed to ordering like 1000’s of them…although if you had a CAD file of some kind of the board that was compatible you could probably get it cut by the supplier to your rocker and deck x whatever width…
Is that what surftech does for the cores to their boards?? Are they molded??
Hahahah…as I was writing, “maybe if you ordered 10,000…” above, I thought to myself, who would order thousands of the same blank at once?? I immediately thought surftech…but I wasnt sure if surftech actually molded the blanks to finished shape or if they had some other way of doing it that might save them some $$ on production costs…cause surftech can never save enough $$ in production…haha
a board at the the ASR trade show was just that , a blend of eps/epp , with an internal horizontal stringer blown in 4 lb and surfed straight out of the mould …
molded eps products are everywhere…ever buy a large electronic product with the molded eps packaging material inside?
so yes, it can be done, however, molds are usually made of steel and are very very expensive. So it comes down to economies…how long will it take to re-coup the cost of the mold by selling a bunch of $30-50 dollar blanks
He’s been selling an injection molded 7’6" Jeff Johnson funboard blank in different weights for over a year now. Investment per mold is in the 5 figures so you better be serious. I bought/built 6 of them.
They now have a bunch of shortboard molded blanks coming out of the California plant.
Just some finish sanding blank to clean off the pour marks and you can glass them.
pretty much a board in a box in my opinion.
and yes they are rideable
good enough for guys like Andy when reconfigured I guess.
IMHO Jim’s lightyears ahead of most everyone fooling around with this stuff anyway…