Anyhere know of what sort of harm it does to a surfboard to store it when it’s cold?
I came home to find temps around 20 F, or -7 Celsius and my quiver is in my shed.
The damage is done, but anyone know what sort of damage it can cause to foam, flex and so on?
The obvious one is if there is water in any of them
and that 6’0" Coil still looks brand new! Unbelievable
No polymers were harmed in the origin of this thread.
Should be plenty of comment from the "Joisey" boys on this one. I'll just say this: I'm more concerned about heat damage. Had a board shrink wrap itself on Maui. It was in a reflective bag. Oregon just recently had five or six days of below zero weather in which the temps never even got out of the 20's during daylight hours. That kind of brutal cold is new to me, but it didn't phase the local boys as they left there boards on car roof tops overnight. Seems like the only thing it could cause would be delams from water soaked dings.
Like McDing, I would worry more about the effects of heat than the effects of cold. Looking at the thermometer here, it's literally freezing: 0 degrees C right now, having warmed up some overnight. Yesterday was (as he described it) kinda brutal out on the water. Our friend, Mister Wind Chill at work. Much nicer today.
Heh- live weather from my neighborhood, in 'standard' units:
But, and going back to the original question, what about storing boards that will be used in cold weather, not just storing 'em over the winter.
In 40 years I've never seen any damage to a board from cold that wasn't water-leak-related and even then, I suspect it was more about the water than the temperature.
But one thing I might think about is storing boards inside, in the warm, and then taking 'em out and putting 'em in water that was just above freezing. You'd have an abrupt temp change of ~40-60 degrees F ( change = 20-30 in real degrees) such that the outer skin of the board would shrink while the inside wouldn't - lets not forget that polystyrene and polyurethane foams are very good thermal insulators. You could get some shearing forces close to the glass, maybe even some shear in the foam as the colder outside foam might be a bit brittle compared with the stuff on the inside.
So, my suggestion: store the boards outside, under cover but not in a heated area. If taking 'em to the water, putting 'em inside a well-padded bag ( which would act like a soft-sided cooler) if you're travelling to the water with the boards inside a heated van. Best to leave 'em inside the bags when they're not in the water anyhow.
Now, this worry about temperature transitions may just be a foolish notion on my part, but the above is general good practice anyways, warm or cold, to prevent the little 'garage dings' as I call 'em that seem to be the cause of lots of little leaks and delams. I treat my own boards that way and the only dings I've had on my boards in the years since I started doing it have been when I got run into out in the water.And they look like brand new.
hope that's of use
doc
Two years old and still looking brand-new? You're not beating on it hard enough!!
Where you been? I expected video and about three more orders from you by now!
I’'ve been cutting weight for MMA so I am mainly using it when the 6/5 mm is on!
It’s time for an order, I’ll be swinging by your neck of the woods again around Feb I think
OK, remind me not to argue with you over your board dims....
Send me an em to get going, I look forward to it.
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Should be plenty of comment from the "Joisey" boys on this one. I'll just say this: I'm more concerned about heat damage. Had a board shrink wrap itself on Maui. It was in a reflective bag. Oregon just recently had five or six days of below zero weather in which the temps never even got out of the 20's during daylight hours. That kind of brutal cold is new to me, but it didn't phase the local boys as they left there boards on car roof tops overnight. Seems like the only thing it could cause would be delams from water soaked dings.
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i personally dont like to leave mine out in the cold. i built a rack in my romm for em. i just am afraid any little bit of water cold freeze and crack the glass or something. it gets too cold in "joisey". but i know alot of people that just lave em in the garage.
I’ve got mine in the garage where it gets to about 40 F unforunately. That’s also my shaping bay and it’s hard to turn a rail with numb hands. But that’s the price we pay for living up north. I would be afraid of soaked dings that freeze and expand causing delam. As long as you keep it above freezing I don’t think it would be too bad.
doc has a good point about putting a room tempature board in freezing cold water, here in Jersey all my boards are stored in the garage which is basically the same temp as outside and I never had a problem .
First off, thanks, you reminded me of something that I should have thought of in the first place when all this came up... so I'll try to make up for that now.
Now for something that we may not like. The Ideal Gas Law.
I know, "what the hell does that have to do with anything, Uncle Doc?" I'll show ya, and with any luck it'll carry over to other stuff too. Science can be cool, and in this sense, literally cool.
Now, the Ideal Gas Law goes like this: PV=nRT, where P is Pressure, V is Volume , n is the number of gas molecules you're dealing with, R is a constant and T is temperature in absolute degrees: degrees above absolute zero.
Still with me? Another way to look at it is if you change something on one side of the equals sign then there's a change on the other side which you can use the Ideal Gas Law to figure out.
For instance, heat up a gas, air lets say, and keep the pressure the same, what happens? Well, the temperature goes up and the volume goes up, so it gets a lower density - that's how hot air balloons work. Compress a gas ( the pressure goes up, the volume goes down) and the temperature will go up - that's how Diesel Engines work, without spark plugs. Heat up a gas and the pressure will go up, and if it can expand it will - that's how the engine in your car works, heated gas pushing against pistons trying to expand, and it does.
Okay, neat - what does that have to do with surfboards and cold?
Well now. Surfboards are mostly gas. That's how come they are so light, it's how come leaving a dark board in the sun ( where the temperature goes up) will make the gas in it expand and make the board delaminate - the pressure inside goes up and it can blow the glass off the foam.
But what about cold?
Okay, what if the board was warm, say 68 degrees F, inside a heated house. Let's change that to Celsius, 'cos it makes the math easier. Call it 20 degrees Celsius, or 293 degrees Kelvin, which is in relation to absolute zero.
All right, you put it in your padded board bag, so it doesn't get beat up on the way out the door or the ride to the beach. The foam padding acts as an insulator, like those pizza delivery bag things, so the board stays warm all the way. You, being smart, put on your 6mm wetsuit at home so you stay warm all the way too and off you go to the beach. Where the air temperature is freezing and so is the water, call that zero degrees Celsius or 273 Kelvin.
The board, once it comes out of the board bag, goes directly into the water. And it starts to chill, fast. The gases inside it want to shrink ( volume wants to go down) but it can't because it's surrounded by fiberglass, the pressure goes down instead. By an amount that's 273/293 - call it roughly 11/12.
And if you have a hole in the board, a star ding, an unfixed ding, mebbe a few pinholes - the board wants to equalise the pressures inside and out, and those let it happen. Okay - it wants to get to 12/12 and it's at 11/12, it wants to make up that 1/12.
Where will it be sucking in the volume to make things up? Well.....it's surrounded by water. So it'll suck in water. If you have pinholes- well, what part of a board has the least glass on it and is most likely to have pinholes - the bottom, right?
Not good.
Now, I'm not saying it'll immediately inhale 1/12 of the board's volume of water. There's a few reasons why not, including the insulating qualities of foam, the fact that most 'open cell' foams are not all that open, a few others that really get complicated. But it will suck in water. And you don't want that.
So, the moral of the story, keep your boards in unheated spaces, same temps as outside. Fix your dings too. 'Cos the same thing will happen on a summer day, going from hot beach to cool water.
hope that's of use
doc...
Good explanation of something that's been discussed here before, most recently in the context of water absorption properties of open balsa versus glassed. Gordon Clark used to say this pressure change was the hardest thing a surfboard had to endure.
Doc, I loved your book!
It had me on edge all the way through. Powerful building of story to a crescendo of anticipation and climax!
Are you planning a sequel?
Can’t wait for the movie! 
Seriously, you gotta a brain in there!
Hi Mike,
Y'know, I must be a little dim - you're absolutely right. If, in the extreme case I mentioned, going from heated-room-temperature to freezing water, you get a pressure change on the close order of 1/12, well, atmospheric pressure is about 14.5 pounds per square inch. So you'd wind up with a pressure differential of something like 1 PSI .
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's a lot of square inches on a surfboard. Say ( very roughly) you call it 70 inches long, by 20 inches wide, that's about 1400 lbs ....... on each side.
That's a lot of force. Considering that Clark had to make molds to contain similar forces, he'd definitely know.
doc...
Heh- like most science, it's kind of fun when you start to play with it.
As for the movie -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG_u9XwJnW4&feature=related
doing it on a somewhat larger scale......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lkFnSDsqHU&feature=related
Cool, huh? Just avoid the railyards until the temptation goes away.
I only let my brain out on dark nights. It's safer that way.....
doc...