I’m ordering a roll of 6oz E-Glass and wondering if I should order warp bias or regular glass. I’ll be mostly building 9-11’ foot longboards and then some 7-8’ eggs and mini-mals. Then I’ll be using it for repairs as well.
What way should I go?
Will the extra rigidity from the warp bias also make the board stronger w.r.t. breaking in half? or will the rigidness make matters worse?
Do I want more or less flex in the 9-11 foot range?
Just getting started and don’t know enough about flex issues to know which way I should/want to go. I’ll address flex later (after a roll of glass) after learning other aspects of design and craftsmanship.
I’m near to buying another roll too. Where does it all go? I thought the first roll would last and last, but I guess people wanted boards…
Considering your question about strength, certainly more fibers in the lengthwise direction will be stronger and stiffer, and thus resist breakage.
HOWEVER most people seem not to realize the mechanism of breaking. Heck, I’m a licensed engineer, and didn’t see it either. When stressed to near breaking, the initial failure is separation of the lamination from the compression side of the board. I always thought boards broke in tension, but this is not so. Look at a board that has almost broken - one that has buckled. Sometimes the only evidence is a transverse ridge of laminate, obviously separated from the underlying foam. The stringer’s probably also broken, but let’s confine the consideration to glass.
After the separation occurs on the deck, the lam on that side contributes almost nothing to the strength of the board, failure progresses with tension failure of the bottom lam, and VOILA two board halves.
To sum it up, warp glass should make the board somewhat more snap resistant. On the other hand, it’s still 6 ounce or whatever, and warp won’t make it more resistant to pressure dents or dings.
What will I buy next time? I dunno. I seldom break a board so ultimate strength is not my first concern.
NO Brandon, volan is only a surface finish used to promote wetting of the fibers with the resin. Volan treatment has been largely supplanted (that means replaced) by silane finish cloth. The advantage of silane finish is that it laminates almost completely clear, whereas the volan is well known to have a greenish tint to it when laminated with clear resin.
AFAIK, volan is only used to make a board look “classic” and it has no inherently superior strength properties. In days gone by, glass used for surfboards was all volan treated (silane hadn’t been invented yet) and the old boards used 12-ounce in the 60’s, dropping from 9 ounce, 8-ounce, 7-1/2 ounce in the 70’s, to 6-ounce, then 4-ounce.
Silane came out about the time that 7-1/2 ounce cloth was popular, as a result some think that volan cloth is stronger - it’s not, unless it’s a heavier weight material to begin with (which it may be, I haven’t seen 4-ounce volan, mostly 9-ounce).
Howzit Honolulu, Seems like the rolls that Fiberglass Hi. sells come in 125 yds for 4 oz and 170 yds of 6oz so you’re only going to get around 25 boards from a roll. I know I’m ready for another roll of 4 oz myself. One problem we have with Young Bros is they always put the boxes on end which screws up the roll so I usually bring it in by UPS which costs me an extra $33.00.
I find that buckled boards also fracture the foam from the stringer to the rail so I use a bamboo skewer and it will follow the crack in the foam. I’ve seen 1 fracture turn into 4 or 5 by the time it gets to the rail. I’ve also seen them fracture all the way to the bottom lam and that is why a fixed buckled board will usually break. I trench out the area with the skewer and fill with thin Q-sel and lam resin and those don’t break later. Aloha,Kokua