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Whatever, you’re gonna lose strength some saturation and from sheer strength of weave.
Silk has been mentioned, but maybe expensive compare to Fibcloth.
All sorts of cotton is used regularly.
Bamboo laminates work fine, don’t need resin saturation.
Maybe a full wood laminate, like GaryYoung’s Woodwinds, or Cobra’s wood tech, and no cloth above…
Depending on what your goals are, this may be applicable:
http://www.swaylocks.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=234703;#234703
Why exactly are you trying to avoid glass? That’ll help narrow down the alternative list.
Thankyou both for the reply. It is actually for school. I have made two boards outside of school and helped a friend make one as well. But the task for school involves research and so on. Therefore i am looking for some alternatives for fiberglass which may be common household materials or maybe even some sort of geotextile. Once i gather a few of these(say four) i will then evaluate each on say strength, availability, cost, elasicity(i dont want it to stretch more then the resin i dont think), flexibilty(ie for the rails), environmental properties. This may involve some experiments. From this i will conclude which is most suitable and create a board from that.
So at the moment i am just trying to research some materials which could possibly work. So i guess if youve got any materials you have ever wondered about… suggest them and ill let you know how it goes.
Possible Materials so far i think are silk, cotton & hemp (if i can find some)
I was thinking some sort of shade cloth???
Cheers nick
hi
they now cover some foamie boards in tarp without resin. providing little strength i guess though…
Yes doesnt sound too strong at all.
Quote:
Therefore i am looking for some alternatives for fiberglass which may be common household materials or maybe even some sort of geotextile. Once i gather a few of these(say four) i will then evaluate each on say strength, availability, cost, elasicity(i dont want it to stretch more then the resin i dont think), flexibilty(ie for the rails), environmental properties. This may involve some experiments. From this i will conclude which is most suitable and create a board from that.
In your experiment, you’ll have to take into account that different materials imply different building method. For example, with wood veneer and its flexibility, you’ll have to consider the use of wood softeners, steam bending and vacuum bagging.
If you really want to experiment, I’d say wood veneer is interesting, so is paper (check this link : http://kcupery.home.isp-direct.com/ ) and aluminium (it’s been done, Google for it).
Dick Van Straalen in Australia may be worth contacting too maybe , Nick …he’s done aluminium boards , among other things…
ben
Nick,
If you do some searches you’ll find references to people using hemp and cotton. AFAIK noone has used silk yet.
IF you really want to experiment I would peresonally be really interested in hearing any results you have with silk. Silk has the highest textile properties of any natural cloth material and has been used in a wide variety of high-stress applications very successfully. And AFAIK it has not been used in surfboard construction. I hope to incorporate silk into compsan board construction once I get some success making boards that way.
I think its safe to say everone on here will be VERY interested in hearing what you discover on this journey of yours. So please keep us posted! 
-doug
Anything I missed in my first post?
It’s all been tried, with varying degrees of success, and everything’s more labor intensive while not necessarily providing enough gains, that’s why fiberglass cloth is still around.