Driving me NUTS!! I can’t seem to get the nose or tail laps to a point where I don’t need to go back and do damage repair to almost all of them! On a square tail longboard I recently glassed the corners of the tail had a spot where the glass didn’t meet up, so I had to fill the voids with resin. I also have tough times with round-pin tails and longboard noses where I can’t get the glass to wrap tightly to the corner and then when I sand the board I end up having to go back and fill in the void.
I feal this is such a lame issue to be having considering I’ve glassed close to 80 boards! What the hell am I doing wrong!?
its mostly a matter of practice, sharp scissors, taking your time trimming the glass, and checking before you laminate (push the glass where the squeegee is going to push it, see if it covers/wrinkles/has too much overlap). Helps a lot to watch someone really good do it, too. Do you feel like you are rushing, and messing up because you’re in a hurry? Or is it mostly the glass is in the wrong places/trimmed wrong?
everysurfer…I use Poly resin and on the latest board I was using 10oz Volan which I know is much harder to lap than pretty much anything else. And it was tinted. I made one relief cut at the tip of the nose (Longboard) and then two more, one on each side of that about four inches to each side.
keithmelville…I don’t really feel rushed. It’s weird because I think the rest of the process has come extremely easy to me. I did ding repair for years as a side job, maybe that helped. If I could eliminate this issue it would save me tons of time and more importantly it would get me closer to the super high quality glass jobs I’m striving for. I wish I could watch somebody…I’ve basically been self-taught. I know I’m still a total beginner, but this is my one real hang-up and it’s killing me!
I have another longboard I will be laminating in a day or so, any tips from you experts out there would be awesome.
I only make relief cuts at corners. For a (real) round tail or nose I won’t make any cuts at all. Unless you stretch the cloth out of shape while wetting it out it will wrap a round curve without wrinkling.
The pros will undoubtably be aghast at my ghetto glassing technique so they should avert their eyes from here on out.
I cut my dry cloth all the way around the template prior to glassing without cutting any relief cuts. Then I wet everything out. After it’s all wet out and squeegeed out on the flats I come back with an old pair of scissors and cut the corners into the cloth while it’s wet. The reason I do this is to avoid any complications in the event my cloth moved between the time I cut it when it was dry and when I go to wrap my laps. Trying to correct after the fact for a measly 1/4" movement in my cloth is a pain in the ass, and my cuts are more accurate once the cloth is stretched out anyway. Use a really short pair of scissors for these cuts, and plan on cleaning them every time you use them. Wetted out cloth will cut very cleanly and you won’t get any hanging chads.
I know, I know - that’s a ghetto cheat that wouldn’t be necessary if I had skillz, but I don’t. So I cheat.
For relief cuts at the corners I cut a narrow (~1/4" wide or less) flap right at the corner itself and shorten it. It’s like 1/4" wide x maybe 1/2" long and is shaped rectangularly. I stretch that down directly over the corner first after its wetted out and squeegee it flat. Sometimes I’ll use my finger tip to do that in order to get the coverage as clean as possible. After the corner is covered THEN I cut the flaps at 90* relative to the very tip of corner. For a tail I lay the sides down first and the tail flap last.
Then I do my other cheat. I feel dirty just explaining it. Any pros who have read this far and against my earlier warning will think even less of me after this.
As the resin starts to set up and get a little gummy I lay a strip of masking tape directly onto the lam over the corner to hold the cloth in place. If it’s a corner I’ll lay a piece so the edge comes to one side of the corner then another piece to cover the other side so that the corner itself is completely covered. I run the tape starting at about 1" in on the “up” side of the lam and wrap the rail and on past the lapline so the end of the tape can stick with some tension on it to the dry part of the underside. I always lay the tape from the “top” to the bottom in the same direction the cloth was laid. Never against the lay of the cloth, if you know what I mean.
Sometimes I’ll lay a 3rd piece that covers the corner itself. Tape over tape at that point. Once the resin cures to the green stage I gently peel the tape off from the “top” to the bottom so it doesn’t get glassed into the cured lamination. By cheating with the tape I get a clean 100% coverage on these corners, usually with zero exposed edges. There’s very little in the way of clean up. A quick pass with a sanding block and it looks like it’s just one piece.
I can and have laid plenty of corners the way the pros so, doing all my cuts in dry cloth and skipping the corner flaps, and most of them come out fine. But this ghetto style approach virtually guarantees I’ll get a good corner. It’s idiot proof.
I posted some photos of how I go about dressing the board in this thread last year the visual might be helpful, though keep in mind I’m a backyarder using only PUPE materials. Besides the very tips, you should not have to use any relief cuts on round sections. Practice learn how to carefully massage the saturated glass with your squeegee and it will wrap nicely and lay flat around curves
Epoxy is easier than resin, because it gets sticky, rather than gel.
Less overhang is easier than large.
Relief cuts make it fold at corners, but care must be taken to avoid no cloth areas.
Two layers of thin cloth is better than one layer of thick. Why Volan 10 oz? Just making it hard on yourself, unless you are making a historic art-piece, or just love a challenge.
Some don’t wrap the cloth tight , but instead leave it like a cone. Leave it a little open, and fill with resin at touch up. That looks like what Bud did in his thread. I personally don’t loke this method, because you have resin with no cloth after you grind it back. The tips with cloth should be strongest structurally, but with no cloth, they always chip and ding.
Last tip, cut some thin palstic, .4 mil painters plastic into strrips, 1" by about 6 inches. Use it like masking tape to hold the cloth in place. It peels off after the resin is cured.
Why the Volan? Well…I guess because I haven’t used it much and like the way it looks on a tinted glass job. But yea, I know two layers are much easier to work with.
Never in a million years would have thought about taping down the cloth! And the method of leaving a small strip directly at the corner is something I’ve always thought may work but once I get going I forget about it. I’ll have to give it a shot.
These few issues are what’s keeping my boards from looking really nice (In my opinion, and I’m my toughest critic). They look great to the untrained eye, but to anybody that knows a thing or two about glass jobs they could pick out some flubs here and there. Mostly only with tinted or pigmented lam jobs.
corner flaps? taping cloth down? trimming the glass after wetting out? I don’t know why any of that is necessary. After 80 boards you should be able to do it more normally. Just take your time doing any relief cuts, don’t do any more cuts than you need, and check the tricky spots as they set up…
Like I said, if I had any natural talent I might do things differently.
In my defense I did do it the other way for most of those other boards. But I was so impressed with what a vacuum bag does to a wet lam on a corner I decided to emulate that, which the tape does quite nicely. I hate filling/repairing corners on a fresh lamination, so really I consider it faster to do it well than to do it fast. For me, anyway. It’s been a while since I’ve had to fill or fix a corner.
Besides, I mostly do no-pinline cutlaps, and I’m often doing tints and opaques, so being neat comes in handy with those.
I start my laps in the middle on each side and work my way to the ends. With certain outline curves I find it helps if you don't pull the cloth towards the ends of the board as you tuck the laps... more like directly perpendicular to the outline. On a few wide nosed longboards I've tugged the laps 'backwards' (back towards the tail) with my fingers as I'm following the tuck with my squeegee towards the end. On the wide noses especially if you've tugged too much toward the nose, your laps will almost certainly be prone to wrinkling. If you're lucky, by tugging the laps perpendicular or even slightly 'backwards' as you go, you sort of compress the weave back before it starts bunching up on you right at the end. I'm not sure if I'm explaining that right but some of you probably understand what I mean? Another trick is to let the nose and tail flaps just hang until the resin starts to thicken. It's easier with epoxy but if you time it right with polyester you're good to go - I usually babysit the ends and double check my laps until I'm pretty sure the resin has started to gel... it's also a good time for scooping any unused resin from the bucket and squeegeeing it along where your deck layers cross over the laps from the bottom helps to avoid those pesky air bubbles that sometimes occur along the lapline.
The best seal is Cerex N-Fusion, wet out on a table, and vacuumed. It adds absolutely no extra weight over hand laminating. After the N-Fusion layer is done with epoxy, you can even go ahead and glass EPS normally with polyester.
I use EPS/epoxy and what helped was making sure my blank was well-sealed on those sharp corners. After revisiting micro balloons & Cab-o instead of spackle, I’ve noticed less air pockets and gaps when I sand my laps and lam the bottom.
Being glass ballons and resin (and a touch of x-55 for faster sealing), those corners come out stronger with less air and denting during handling (I’m a clutz in the shop, getting better, lol). So, I’m defecting to the microballon team; it’s a little more work, but I think that’s one big reason why my lams are improving.
EDIT: During 3 board-builds I was in belief that my EPS foam didn’t need sealing (and it doesn’t --if I don’t care about finished weight; but I do). After 3 heavier-than-normal boards, the surface of the foam still needs a prep, otherwise my laps (and deck/bottom) suffer from resin filliing those micro voids, and thus air bubbles and lamming issues. No matter how tightly fused the bead is, sealing is still a big step I must admit.
The first Styrofoam boards, by Hobie, used what we called ‘‘florist foam’’, and I think it really was. One of the Windansea guys brought down a shaped blank, in 1958, that he was going to glass himself. The blank had been coated with epoxy resin at Hobie’s, so that it could be glassed ‘‘normally’’ with polyester resin, as was done on the balsa boards of the period.
It was driving me nuts too and then I went to YouTube. 4 videos and 30 minutes later, I felt very confident. On my next board, one of the few places I didn’t screw up was the tail and nose sections.
