Been reading Swaylocks for maybe 6 months now. Started a hovercraft a while back which has stalled due to this board. Was going to be in Hawaii and already had some experience with polyester and wanted a project to do with my cousin over winter break. I’ll see if I can get some pics of his board to post as well.
We happened to buy 2 blanks from the Clark warehouse on Oahu about a week before the shutdown. We shaped them inside a garage and glassed them outside in Manoa. I have the imbedded dirt/seeds/mosquitos to prove it. Materials from Fiberglass Hawaii and home depot. We probably didn’t save much by making them ourselves with all the misc costs for making our own stands, tools, etc but we had a lot of fun.
Started with a 10’1" Y, ended up at about 10’2" x 25 x don’t know, I need to find out. Oak tail block. Fabric from Aloha swap meet. Graphics done on rice paper fed through an inkjet printer. 3x6oz top 2x6oz bottom (we wanted them to be pretty indestructable).
The airline dropped it leaving long spider cracks down one rail so I got a little happy with the sander removing the cracks and some mistakes from rushing it in Hawaii. Re-Sandcoated it and got mostly nice results with long sticky stripes I now believe are due to the cold weather here in the bay area (54 def F). I’ve been heating my resin in hot water before applying and it seems to solve the problem but not before I had to sand the whole thing down again and sticky up a ton of sand paper.
The local plastics store (Tap Plastics) has never heard of gloss resin, the stuff we bought from Fiberglass Hawaii was very hard and glossy. Anyone know where to get something similar in the bay area? I think I’d still like to gloss it.
Special thanks goes to the owner of Aloha Surf Shop (where we looked at boards and felt their rails and mined him for knowledge), my cousin Ryan who built them with me, the “How to Build Your First Surfboard” site by Stephen Pirsch, and of course Swaylocks where we found all the details.
