Been playing with ideas for another board. The Fish works very nicely, scrapped the quad, tri, twin set-ups and put on a couple of FCS FK-2 and it goes very well.
So now its time for an EPS something. Fancy doing cork/cedar laminated rails. But where can one get lengths of cork in UK?
Plan to laminate the rails and partially shape them. Join them together. Fit EPS inside and complete shaping. Wood deck and bottom.
Or maybe fit EPS/glass/Hd foam inside the rails and then glass.
hey rik, on the two boards ive done so far with cork and timber rails i did the following,
number 1 cork floor tiles from b and q. about 300mm square and prob somewhere between 2-3mm thick. layered with strips of sapele. because of the thickness it was quite hard to clamp but easy to build thickness.
number 2 cork from hindleys (educational supplier) think sheets were around 1000mm x 600mm and bout 1mm thick. layered with 1.5mm ply. very easy to lay up but obviously lot more layers needed.
if you do manage to find any longer legnths please share!
i was looking at the danny hess boards a while ago and trying to come up with similar ideas, sounds like your almost along the same lines.
i was thinking of making a laminating former of half the board, ie stringer line on the table with half the plan shape coming up of the table and then extruded to whatever width panel i want. lay up full sheets to the correct thickness then vac bag till set. then just a case of marking the rail shape for either side, cut out with a jigsaw and bring the two pieces together to form the outer rails, then add a stregnthener bar between the two, sort of tenoned in place.
hope you understand the above, if not ill try and post a sketch tomorow at work
My next experiment is going to be shaping a blank 3 mm smaller all around and using it as a plug to cold mould thin skins over.
I probably can’t explain this very well but my plan is to shape a high density blank as normal, just 3mm or so thinner all around. Once shaped I’ll cut the rails off so that I am left with 3 pieces: the main part of the blank to mould the deck and bottom skins and two rail pieces to mould the rails.
I’m going to build the ‘fishbone’ frame as usual for a HWS and attach the deck and bottom skins as normal, except that they will already have whatever shape they are going to have. The next step will be to attach the two hollow rail pieces and fair them to the main body of the board.
If it all goes to plan, I hope to finally get a lightweight hollow surfboard.
I was just a little bummed to spend so much time and effort on my hollow bamboo board only to double its weight by putting cork/bamboo rails on it.
Cold moulding, great way to go. Doing a cold moulded boat with my students at the moment. We’re doing 3 layers of 3mm mahogany veneers ±45 and 0 degrees.
What thickness you going to use? The rails will be pretty tight curvature, bagging, steaming, brute force…???
While I’m a huge fan of brute force coupled with ignorance, I’ll be using a vac bag for the skins and rails.
The layup for the rails will probably look like carbon/.8mm bamboo/.8mm bamboo/glass. The deck and bottom layup will be similar but the bamboo will be 1mm and might have a layer of light glass between the two layers of boo.
In theory it should all work fine, I hope that I can bring it all together in practice. I won’t be starting on this board for another couple of months due to other things getting in the way.
Balsa can be tricky for rail laminations. I tried cedar and balsa (since it is lighter than cork) for a rail lamination and ended up scrapping the whole thing. The balsa crushed under the pressure of the clamps toward the tighter curve of the nose and tail.
You can reduce the weight of the rails by routing out the interior as well.
I get my cork from Bangor Cork. They sell rolls and will cut sheets to any length you want.