Dumbest thing you've ever done making boards???

General Discussion
1

Post the dumbest…funniest thing you’ve ever done while making boards.

My Dumb Story:

Back when I first started out when I was in high school I glassed my first board on my parent’s driveway and it left a perfect outline of a 6’4 thruster that is still visible over 25 years later.  Needless to say my father flipped!!!

On the next board under threat of death I swore I would not get resin on the driveway.  My solution was heavy plastic sheeting from the hardware store.  Got to work glassing my new stick on a hot summer day.  I knew I needed to work fast because of the heat.  All went well until a bit of resin got on the plastic sheeting.  Do you guys have any idea how slippery resin on top of plastic sheeting is???  Its more slippery than ice!!!  It was quite a dance getting that board glassed without falling down.  As I was finishing up my feet started sticking to the plastic and lifting it up.  Total shit show but the board came out OK for board #2.  Funny looking back.  Good times.

2

Strip the glass off a relatively pristine 9’8 Harbour Trestle Special to shape it down with a block plane, shureform and sandpaper into a 6’4 squaretail at the start of the ‘shortboard revolution’…

which of the two do you think I’d like to have in the quiver right now…lol

 

 

3

When I first started out I was doing a midlength single fin eggo and decided I wanted to get more glide out of it.   So I added another couple pounds of resin to the finish of my 6x6+6 glass job.

 

I later gave the board to my brother in law and he loved it.  

4

Back in high school my dear brother was asked to make a foam and glass paipo for a friend and he decided to add all the crazy ass ideas he had from idolizing people like Tom Morey. He made a needle nose board with about an inch of concave in the bottom. So much concave that it had a humped deck. Whoa, our friend didn’t know what to say when it was done. As far as I know it never touched the ocean.

When I was in 6th or 7th grade a family friend gave us a shaped blank, and my dad thought it was too big for me so he re-shaped it and glassed it. He didn’t know that lam resin stays tacky, so the board sat for a very long time, like years. It was never finished, it got covered with dust, and he just lost all desire to finish it.

I haven’t done my dumbest thing yet, but I do dumb things all the time. Maybe the dumbest thing is trying to make boards without the proper work space or tools. Or, making so many boards that I don’t ever use a board more than a day or two in a row. I’m always taking a different board out when I go surfing. Wish I lived right at the surf spot like when we were young. I could go out surf for a while go in change boards and get back out in no time, then just keep doing that all day. I’d be able to see which ones work better in certain conditions and which ones I really like. Nothing like using several boards over the course of a couple hours to see the differences in them.

5

When I was 18 I attempted to glass on a thruster set of fins instead of using a fin system. I didn’t watch any videos, you tube wasn’t around then, and I only recieved verbal instructions. Being a dumb kid, I didn’t really listen well, and I let the cloth patches harden completely. It looked like I had three punk rock fins, all had mowhawks! I figured it would be best to try to cut them anyways…well, 6 blades, and a lot of blood later I went with using a grinder…that wasn’t any better. You could hear the fins humming from a mile away. Live and learn.

6

I glassed my first board without adult help back in the 60’s when I was still a grom.  It actually came out looking pretty decent.  The problem was… I didn’t use enough MEKP.  The resin never cured, and just stayed a sticky mess.  

On the next try, another grom friend (who’s dad was a big time surfboard glasser) and I decided we’d mix super hot to avoid any chance of a repeat.  As I was spreading my first lam coat the resin started to kick before I completely wet out the cloth.  Then it started getting really hot and changing color in front of our eyes… first yellow, then darker almost brown… then it started cracking, popping, smoking, and… the whole board burst into flames!  Yikes.  We ran around the yard screaming, and finally took a hose to the mess.  Thankfully we were in the middle of our backyard so we didn’t burn the house down.

Next few tries included adult supervision :wink:

7

 

Ha ha ha

Early 70’s

did the same thing even had a batch blow up and splash burning resin on me (used to work in just those scalloped short surf shorts and slippers back then) which I immediate washed off with rags soaked in acetone and gasoline. (yup in those days we couldn’t get acetone and just used gasoline like when we cleaned our paint brushes with back then).  Remember that penetrarting horse linament we used back then for sore muscles that made your breath stink?

Got MEKP in my eye once and that hurt like hell

Gloss coated a board in a steel tool shed with no ventilation (almost passed oiut from the fumes)

Repaired my dinged surfboard in the stairwell of my dormitory at UW after shipping up on a plane wrapped in an old army sleeping and rope. Almost got kicked out of the dorm for that one

 

Early 2000’s

tried to vacuum bag a wood skin on without a vacuum

tried to hand lam blue texalium on the bottom of a home made gemini twin nose

didn’t listen and played around too much with the wrong stuff that I developed sensitivity to epoxy.

 

its all a learning experience if it doesn’t kill you

8

lol. wow Kendall, that is freaking hilarious

i remember the first time i ever tried to glass on a fin, i didnt think about trying to glue down the fin to begin with

i just had the fin tapped off in the position that i wanted and tried to glass around it with the fin moving every time i put pressure on it, what a nightmare that was

9

for my first glass job - my dad was showing me the ropes. I was pouring the resin, adding catalyst, etc but he was doing most of the work. We were running a little shy so I mixed up some more resin for him and in the process got some resin on my hands. no problem - pour some acetone on them to clean up. acetone can looked a lot like the resin can and i poured resin all over myself…

also did a sweet resin swirl with some epoxy resin for a buddy. too bad when i added hardner, i was actually adding more resin. that damn resin jug looked a lot like the hardner jug. see a pattern developing…well i took off the soggy cloth, squeegeed a good batch of clear resin into the blank and glassed over clear. it came out a ‘foam stain’ instead of a pigment swirl. my buddy (who watched me do the swirl) picked up his board and said ’ the resin swirl looks a lot differen than i remember’ hahaha. that board rode well. the colors crystalized after a while - i imagine there was plenty of uncured epoxy resin in that blank…didnt break or aything seemed to hold up fine…

was doing some shaping at night. had the heater plugged in, washer and dryer going on the other side of the shed, air compressor kicked on, and i was planing a blank. all that going on flipped the breaker switch. all of a sudden pitch black no light no sound. i thought i was dead for a quick moment haha

 

10

For me, being a self-taught backyard/garage hobbyist, I've obviously made so many it would be hard to pick "the dumbest."  Seemingly everything I now know I've learned the hard way. 

Stripped an original Hobie balsa (and other vintage boards) in vain reshaping attempts(?!),  on my first glass-job I flipped the whole board over (on my 'racks' - a trashcan) to tuck my laps, on another board I tried to install a finbox with uncatalyzed resin - simply forgot the MEKP,  another time I plugged in a sander which was sitting on a board with the trigger lock engaged, I've had boards fly off the racks while being sanded, shaped blanks damaged nearly beyond repair...  I was dangerous!

Seriously, the list is endless and doesn't begin to include basic technical screw ups like pin air in my lams, smeared/uneven pigment jobs, crooked fins, unintentional gross asymmetries, wonky pinlines,  etc, etc, etc. 

At this late stage it's a safe bet that I'm past my prime and relearning some things the hard way (again!)  It's a rare thing indeed for a board to get through an entire build without something going haywire.

It's why I try to be helpful to new guys around here going through similar ordeals.  I can quite literally feel their pain.

11

How about;  toe a couple of side-bites out instead of in or the occasional UN-intentional Asymetrical(pre-Pleskunas') Lowel 

12

Single pour ProBox fin install....1.5 EPS foam...85 degree day...total melt down....big time!

live and learn

13

Started making my own boards to save money!..

14

Made plenty:), just lately went to paint  a board with white sealer and thought while im at it ill do the Eps one I had sitting close by forgetting that I was sealing the PU with solvent based white sealer!!! A couple of spray passes in i noticed the beads in the eps starting to bubble/shrink , stopped just in time to avoid any major damage but pretty annoyed when I had to sand back a finished shape!

 

15

Man some of this stuff is painful to read but hilarious!  My own are kinda painful to relate too, 'cuz I have tried so hard to block the memory out LOL.  So many… 

Stuff like sealing a wood board with poly resin that never cured and then glassing over that with epoxy anyway and having huge delams as a result, weird experimental building method failures some of which ended in water-filled hollow wood surfboards, designing my own original shapes without a clue, taking a heat gun to a tiny dent on a newly lammed foam blank that wasn’t even worth worrying about and turning it into a major fluster cluck, and come to think of it, just diving into board building without really much of a clue what I was doing!

And yes, like sharkcountry, building way more boards than I have any reasonable need for and so always being behind on riding new boards meaning I usually have several new boards I haven’t ridden or have barely ridden and yet several more under construction or in the planning stage and constantly trying new boards so never really getting one wired or really really learning what works and why, or at any rate, stretching out that process ad infinitum…

Oh yeah, and lately, taking finished hollow wood surfboards apart and completely rebuilding them when I could probably have built a new one in half the time and effort!

Great idea for a thread, kinda therapeutic!

16

The absolute worst thing i EVER did …

Made a very nice looking [in retrospect] compsand longboard. All balsa, rails, deck and bottom.

The hotwire offcuts were used to vacuum the rails in. Lots of work!!

What i understoord was you could final touch the balsa. So, before glassing the bottom, i had tried to perfect the contours

But omg, balsa is harder in certain places than other! So the bottom was now imperfected with the hard grains sort of sticking out

At that point, i became so mad and frustrated, i took the board, and my planer and…  just shave the whole bottom off.

…

How silly in rertrospect. Then, the board moved from workshop to workshop, and after like 3 years i put a lot of effort in it, and decided to reinforce it good

Vacuumed 5mill ply onto it

So now it was too heavy

Again put the planer to it, before finally finishing it off with just plain ol #2 vaccumed to the bottom

Reshaped, reglassed

Surfed like shit after that!

Traded it for a Billabong 6ft7 * 19.5 with a 13 tail and roundish nose

Called it done after that!

Still, when thinking i put a planer to that board… Dumbest thing ever 

17

Dumbest thing we all do is not wear masks or respirators while board building.

Last night I had my respirator hanging from around my neck while pouring poly into gallon jugs. Chose the ease of drinking my beer over personal safety. True story!

Then I sanded a ding repair with no mask! Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb!

You know we all do it. Don’t lie…

Starting today I pledge to wear masks every time I do work on a board! Who’s with me?

~Brian

18

What haven't I done wrong might be easier...

-Tried to do a rocker lam with EPS and white PVA glue. It didn't dry and dripped off the rocker table, past the tarp, and onto the carpet in the living room.

-Waited two years and then started shaping the next two boards without a reference board or reference person. Cutting tail and nose opposite one one of them. Bumpy rails, dry lam, exothermed leash plugs, numerous shop dings and sand-throughs and cutlapped patches.

-Going against published advice and kept using/using up low styrene poly for EPS to glass lams- more stink, less clear than epoxy. Switching to epoxy for EPS, will save poly work for outdoors in the summer.

-Cross-mixing 2-year old poly gloss resin with fresh for glossing. Both worked fine by themselves with improved application technique (adding solvent and fewer brush strokes).

 

19

What are you guys talking about.  I haven’t had any of these problems.

20

First time using epoxy I forgot to pour it all on the board at one time. It seemed so benign until the mixing pail started smoking. Boy that stuff gets hot fast!!!