after shaping a few boards i have an order, well stoked.
the deal is one of our students at uni (from textile dept) is designing patterns for surfboards and snowboards and so ive been asked to help create a showpiece for her work. its a step up from anything ive done so far so were gonna do two boards in case the first goes wrong… fingers crossed it wont. she gets to show both then we both keep one at the end.
all it will cost me is the price of my blank! she is paying for the rest and my profit will be the board.
attached are some images of her fabric, a sample of her fabric glassed on some foam with doodles in posca pens and the outline of a single fin from another thread which is sorta what im looking at.
ill post my ideas later but look forward to your feedback
the test panel was done with an old piece of homeblown mdi, for this board i have a choice of a bennett blank 6’7R i was thinking or a US Blanks 607P 1/8’’ in Basswood. can anyone comment on suitability of one over the other. i will be glassing with RR epoxy fast.
The customer has to finalise her pattern and overall design and obviously i have to influence her slightly due to ways of making so was thinking of suggesting to her tinted bottom with inlayed cotton deck panel, with a cutlap.
then once its hotcoated she can take it and doodle with the posca’s and ill add a pinline on the edge of the cutlap.
im thinking single 4oz bottom with the resin tint and using clingfilm to hold the laps down on the rails, wait till it gels then flip, remove the clingfilm and cut the laps. this way the clingfilm will protect the lam from the racks.
the deck i could do with some advice. the fabric will be cut to fit within the cutlap but should i put fabric onto foam with 2 layers of 4oz over the top or should i sandwich the fabric between two layers of 4oz? i seem to remember bert berger talking about something like this a while ago but cant find it in the resources. im guessing its either gonna act like a sandwich or im gonna struggle with not having the glass bonding together??? help please.
so are you saying just one layer of 4oz on top of the fabric which freelaps over the rails or a piece the same size as my fabric with another larger piece which freelaps over the rails?
i wasnt thinking the fabric would add any stregnth and i will now be doing it the way you suggest but if it was between the two layers of glass would it not be like a sandwich construction ie increasing the thickness increases the stregnth? after all the foam used in sandwich construction methods has little stregnth on its own.
i am thinking of making some fins for the boards for sure. the style of her design is probably going to dictate wether i make these boards single or thruster and im even thinking i might get some more probox for the one im keeping as im loving the quad setup on my 8’10!
below are some fins i made for a friend for his birthday a month or so ago. i printed the design(my logo) onto the glass with my inkjet printer and laid this in the middle of the stack as i layed them up.
the block of wax on the centre of the board is homemade too!
ok folks so ive just recieved two blanks from seabase, both 6’9" EA us blanks. i wasnt too impressed with their packaging technique but at least im planning to take a fair bit of foam away!
so what do you guys think i should shape, one will be a single fin and the other a thruster.
i like the single fin shape i posted earlier but unsure as to what to do with the other, part of me was thinking make them identical for practice but variety is the spice of life! haha!
also im planning on doing a resin tint on the bottom of these, is there any other way than buying lots of expensive half kilo pots that will last forever? anything else i could use and if not what colours should i go for, white yellow and green?? then i can use the white to pastelize the colours? i did a fair bit of pigment mixing for screen printing when i studied textiles at college but that was a looong time ago(or seems it)
i see you are in manchester, do you buy any supplies from glasplies in southport, if not they are quite good for glass fabrics and resin tints and you can save on postage costs if you use seabase for these items, its like an aladins cave in there they have all sorts of wierd cloth types, i saw some glass fabric with carbon at 90 deg to each other so when it was wet out there was 1 inch carbon squares visable, pete
i know glasplies, i used them a few years ago when i did some work for a sculptor, i dont know if it was just the day i went in but it seemed really difficult to get info at the shop regarding stuff suitable for surfboards. i should really pop in sometime now i know what im doing. i got a pricelist of them once but was quite confusing and they arent on the web! they could prob make a fortune if they were.
cheers for the reminder tho, i’ll ring them tomorow about the pigment and see if they will post it. what should i be asking for to go with resin research? is it just a standard pigment type for epoxies?
hi shifty, from what ive found here searching it seems to be ok. ive done a small test sample which seems to be fine, even when i hit it with a hammer. i think ive found a shop interested in selling them both when they are done but im tempted to keep one and ride it to see how it holds up.
so heres the progress over the last few days.
blanks arrived
i printed of my template and cut some 2mm mdf as a half template. real easy to cut with a knife and then sanded smooth with a long sanding block.
then i laid this onto the board and marked round, cut with a panel saw as close to 90degrees then sanded with a block set at 90 degrees from the bottom
then i roughly marked where the rail bands were to go and then started mowing with a planer i found in the back of a cupboard at my mates workshop… ill post pics tomorow.
planer worked well but obviously it cant get in to the nose area on the deck due to the concave, i guess ill have to break out my festool sander!
what do you guys think to my 5 minute shaping rack??
im not sure what to do with the bottom shape, for the single fin im thinking single concave running through to slight v in front of the fin running out to flat behind the fin would this work for the thruster setup too?
