Hello All,
First-time poster and never before shaper. So forgive any ignorance. I’ll do my best to make this sense.
I saw another thread that I believe was similar to this, but it quickly divulged into war stories and “nothing is new / environmentally friendly.”
I’ve been fascinated by board design since I started surfing 3 years ago and have recently decided to start shaping boards.
Having watched the EAST, I’m very curious about flax construction. When done right, it appears you can get the strength of a vacuum-bagged epoxy board with ride characteristics that are more similar to that of a PU board.
New tech/fad conversations aside.
Does anyone have any real-world knowledge/wisdom they’d be willing to share? In my scouring of the internet I’ve found very little.
Going off what Gary McNeil described in the EAST:
EPS blank with a stringer or “heavy duty carbon rails”
"Glassed " with:
4 ounce flax and a 6 ounce fiber glass - top and bottom (I’m assuming)
Finally, I understand historically, swaylocks have been used to data mine shaping secrets for use by pop-out manufacturers such as Surftech. That’s not my intention here, but that’s probably what they all say.
In hunting, there is a cliche of “I’m new to hunting, looking for good spots to hunt. Please share GPS coordinates.” I hope what I’m asking isn’t the equivalent of that, so apologies if this comes off as one of those posts.
sanded on here sells flax cloth through his business, you could DM him to buy material and get insights.
Worth following them on Insta and going back through their posts, there’s a lot of flax and other alternative materials in there for inspiration:
Never used, it but have been getting alternative boards built for 20+ years.
Shapers/glassers are willing to build most anything if you pay them. Find a local shaper willing to do contract glassing and provide the materials. That’s the easiest/quickest way to vet a material you’re interested in trying. Build it and ride it for yourself.
Something else to look at if you’re interested in durability/performance/lightness is cork. Go follow this guy on Insta:
Been riding his boards for 15+ years. He’s doing carbon/cork/vacuum bagging
BTW, this post looks like it’s in Board Archive → Materials category. You’ll get a lot more views/feedback if you repost it in the General Discussion category.
@vido Welcome to the forum.
I have it from a reliable source that the original post was moved to General Discussion so the existing replies would not not be lost.
I just made a small board for my brother for a wave rider style wave pool. He wanted something that would have strong deck and not get a lot of pressure dents.
I saw some posts on social media by McNeil and decided to give flax a try. I glassed the deck of his board with a flax inlay then did another lam that wrapped the rails with 4 oz glass. The deck seems very solid.
I won’t be able to say whether the combination does the trick because the board is made from a hard XPS foam that I get as coolers and I don’t know what the density is. This foam seems harder than the blue Dow XPS I used to use.
I got the flax on Amazon after a lot of searching for a inexpensive deal. I got 4 yards at 60 inches wide cloth for $21 USD. I free hand drew the white line around the inlay with a wide posca pen.
@sharkcountry I’ve been searchin for this flax you bought. Everything Ive found has been linen. Can you share where you got it from? Ive been looking high and low.
Cheers
@jrandy Right, so I was under the assumption that regular linen would serve my purposes just fine. Then I did little more research and came to find out linen is actually processed flax which loses some if its tensile strength. Or at least that’s what Chatgpt told me.
So, perhaps linen is just another word for flax cloth, but I am currently under the impression raw flax cloth is actually different than linen. In most the boards built for the EAST the product looks almost like a burlap. Which is a different plant ( jute) which doesn’t have the tensile strength of flax either.
If its actually the exact same thing then I’m stoked cause it comes in pretty colors
The plot thickens!
I had not thought about the level of processing, but that makes perfect sense. The clothing industry is going to want smooth, soft, colorful without worrying about tensile strength. Using it in a surfboard as a glassing material that is more sustainable, tensile strength and minimal processing (which go together in your findings) becomes more important.
Linen is made from flax. Just be careful to not get something that says cotton, a lot of the items will say cotton muslin. If it says 100 percent Linen it is flax.
I should add that this is fabric, not surfboard specific flax cloth. I don’t know where to find that stuff. I did a search and I couldn’t find anything that seemed like it was made for surfboards. I did the inlay to avoid lapping the cloth, but I think it would work if I cut the fabric in the right spots to not bunch up.
This stuff reminded me of bamboo cloth once the resin was cured, it sands differently than glass cloth. This will require some getting used to, but it seems very strong.
On standard mechanical tensil test flax/linen epoxy is less strong, stiff than glass. At same weight a flax epoxy skin is thicker than a glass epoxy one’s that give buckling strengh and flexural stiffness, exactly what’s needed for board skin.
Bending skin stiffness is mostly function of thickness with material in same stiffness range. Flax (58Gpa) and glass (72Gpa) are in same stiffness range, at same weight flax epoxy skin will be stiffer than glass epoxy. If you add more fiber over you will increase bending stiffness.
What you need to increase board strengh is to increase final skin buckling strengh. For that you can: increase skin stabilsation with a stronger, stiffer support (= denser foam with overall stiffners) and/or increase skin bending stiffness ( stiffer materials, thickness).
Board skin break by buckling, it’s a bending destabilisation. Increase bending stiffness is the key, + it will increase dent strength. If you do it with stiff but brittle materials like carbon you will loose impact strengh/toughness. If you do it with beefier skin of tougher materials you will also increase thoughness but weight too.
When you make a gun you increase blank foam density, stringer strengh and you make a beefier skin with more glass. Board is heavier and a lot more stronger.
I really like the cork boards. It’s a much more complex process though and really needs to be vacuum-bagged to get the ideal strength/adhesion.
Here’s the flax cloth you want:
Hopefully @sanded can chime in and give you exact glassing schedules. They sell the stuff and seems like they have experimented with all their materials quite a bit so they can likely give you a really good starting point for a glass schedule/EPS density.
You best bet it just going to be build a board and try it, and iterate from there.
