First Board Project

CassS · September 12, 2011, 5:53am

Right, I promised more photos and I’ve finally sorted out my camera issues (crosses fingers), so here goes…

CassS · September 12, 2011, 6:39am

More photos:

Now that I’ve smoothed out the shape, I’m getting ready to paint. I’ve cut out the patterns on sheets of baking paper and will tape them down before painting. I’m severely limited to what I can use by my non-existent budget, so am experimenting with standard acrylic paints, thinned, to be applied with a roller. Hopefully I’ll have enough to get the coverage I’m after.

Note: first daylight shots. I’ve been doing all my shaping at night under the light of one lonely incandescent bulb, but snuck a chance to go out to the shed between sunrise and sunset today while I’m home looking after a sick boy. Will have to negotiate some more time down the track, because I’m going to use UV catalyst when glassing.

It’s about half an inch across and probably only 1/8" deep.

I tried it in different concentrations (paint to thinner) to gauge results. L-R: 1:1, 1:2, 1:3. The colour came out fairly similar in all three, but the 1:3 is way streakier than the 1:1, as you’d expect. I’ve only got one tube of green paint, so will probably thin it 1:3 and shoot for two coats, but i’m being optimistic. I do have a couple of hundred empty beer bottles in the woodshed that I can hand back for 10c a pop, which will buy me some more paint, and three of the DVDs on eBay are selling (50c each), so I’ll probably wait for the results before I commit paint to blank.

CassS · September 23, 2011, 12:30am

Ok, I haven’t posted in a while because there wasn’t much progress. I had to wait for an eBay auction to finish before I could buy all the painting materials. However, I managed to sell a bunch of old DVDs and spent the proceeds, so progress has been made!

There aren’t any photos yet, because my camera’s still playing up (battery power lasts around 24 hours). I taped down the baking paper templates in the previous post and got painting earlier in the week. I had five different tools to try, so I could see which was the most effective at applying the paint to the foam. These included brush, a square of mattress foam, two different kinds of kitchen sponge/scourer and a $1 sponge-headed brush bought from a local art supplies shop. It turns out that a combination of brush for outline and a fine-grained kitchen sponge was the most effective.

The next night (last night) I flipped the board over, intending to just do a line runing about an inch in from the rail all around the bottom, but discovered green spots all over the surface from where I’d touched the board while moving it around the night before. I thought I’d been careful, but there’s careful, and there’s CAREFUL.

This just meant I had to get a bit more creative. I’ll try replacing the camera batteries tonight and will take a couple of photos. Hopefully I’ll be able to post them this weekend.

One thing I am excited about though. I signed the board! It’s a great feeling, signing off on your first shape. It probably surfs like a hippo and turns like an ocean liner, but I can only get better from here.

Photos to come…

CassS · September 25, 2011, 7:41am

More photos:

CassS · October 3, 2011, 5:39am

Well I’ve made some fairly significant progress since my last post. After the green paint above, I added black outlines to give the paint job definition…

I also filled the “second” ding/hole with a combination of foam dust and resin and sanded it flush the deck once it set.

Yesterday we had a beautiful sunny day in the Adelaide Hills, so I managed to convince my wife to give me the morning off child-minding duties to attempt my first glassing job. First, I switched the glassing stands onto my racks…

As you do with these things, I started on the bottom. It all went relatively well, except for a couple of spots either side of the middle where long strands of wet glass hung down and caught on my squeegee or bucket. This pulled the glass a bit off alignment and resulted in some raised sections along the lap line. In hindsight, I probably should have cut the lumps off when the resin first gelled, because these lumps came back to haunt me when I glassed the deck.

I had a bit more trouble glassing the deck than with the bottom, for a number of reasons.

My glassing schedule was 6oz bottom and 6/4oz deck. I’m not too worried about the extra weight - I’m happy to sacrifice lightness for durability. I struggled a bit to get the resin into the rails because the spiky edges of the bottom lap were catching in the glass of the deck layers. It was a constant battle to make sure there were no air bubbles forming at the interface (a battle I eventually lost, as it turns out).

Also, even though I was using UV-catalysed resin, it seemed like it was kicking or gelling before I even made it to wrapping the rails. Could this be because I just didn’t have enough resin to work with?

I also had some trouble wetting out the laps. In all the YouTube videos the pros make it look so easy, with the resin just flowing naturally as they run the squeegee around the rails. Mine just came out all streaky, so I had to manually wet them with a hand/squeegee technique. Unfortunately this resulted in a lot of sticky strings hanging down, which gave me a great big pain in the arse, not to mention resin all up my arms (lost a lot of hair yesterday cleaning up).

Now I could really use some advice before I attempt the hotcoat. Like I said before, the folds in the bottom laps made a bit of a mess of the deck lam in about four places. They stand proud of the board about 5mm and are full of bubbles and glass spikes once the resin had set. What can I do to rectify the situation? Here’s what I thought I might do…

Sand down the bigger lumps, including a few bits of rough glass around the nose and tail.
Laminate small patches of glass over these areas
Apply hotcoat over entire board and sand

Does this sound like a sensible approach?

Another question I could use advice on - There are lots of dribbly drippy bits of resin left over from the deck lam. Should I sand them down before doing the hotcoat? From everything I've read, without the wax in styrene additive, lam resin can be a bit troublesome to sand.

Please help Swaylock’s, I don’t want to go much further without expert advice.

CassS · October 3, 2011, 12:43am

More glassing photos…

Not very accurately aligned, but I’m not that fussed.

I got the resin on the shed floor to kick by rigging up a mirror to shine the sunlight in through the door. It opens to the, East so all future glassing will be done in the morning.

Huck · October 3, 2011, 12:44am

Cass - you're board looks really nice, and I'm sure its gonna turn out a beauty. We all go through the learning curve, fiberglassing is not an easy task, and doing it really well takes several boards' practise.

As far as "expert" advice, count me out. I'm no expert, but I'll share what I know. You cant leave spiky edges on the lap before glassing over it (as you now know). You have to grind, sand, or somehow feather those edges down. If you do a search for laps, or grinding laps, tape laps, free laps, or sanding laps, you'll probably find a boatload of information on the subject. It has been discussed here at length.

I always sand before hotcoating, but I lam with epoxy. So I'll let the poly guys fill you in on the rest.

CassS · October 3, 2011, 12:57am

Thanks Huck, appreciate the feedback. I won’t be leaving those spiky edges next time, that’s for sure. And “expert” is all relative. Anyone who’s made more than one board probably knows more than me…

Another problem I just remembered. I found an air bubble, more of a delam, down near the tail, which I missed somehow when I was glassing. It’s about 1 inch square in size. How should I go about fixing this, now it’s set?

Huck · October 3, 2011, 1:31am

[quote="$1"]

Resin outline: Shed floor level? I don't think so.

[/quote]

Nah, its not that. Its caused by the speed of the earth as it circles the sun (18.5 miles/second).

CassS · October 5, 2011, 12:32am

Right, without the benefit of the wisdom of Swaylock’s (other than Huck’s information on the turning of the earth, thanks again), I had a go at cleaning up my glassing job last night. the lumps in the rails sanded down ok and only one of four ended up exposing the foam - a fairly good hit/miss ratio from my perspective. But I got a little too gung-ho with the sander and went right through to the foam on the nose - bugger. I also sanded back the delam section down at the tail, exposing another 10c-coin sized patch of foam.

So after sanding back to level around these spots, I cut out some 4oz glass patches and fixed them as if they were dings. Rather than waiting for another sunny day, I went down the MEKP route for the resin, I just want to get this thing done! I’ll go back tonight and sand the repairs back ahead of applying the hotcoat.

Another thing I want to do is put an extra tail panel of 4oz to strengthen the area where the fin box is going to be installed. Once that’s in place, it’s hotcoat time. I’ll post photos once I reach this stage. Nobody needs to see my amateurish repairs.

colinIG · October 5, 2011, 12:37pm

nice board mate

If u don’t wanna have a good lookin board and ur not searching for precision, cut that bubble ant fill it with very small (1mm) pieces of fiber (4oz or 6oz) mixed with uv resin… put it in the sun (and serve it hot).

cheers

CassS · October 6, 2011, 11:23pm

Gracias Colin para los consejos.

I’m certainly not looking for precision with the first board, just something that floats and looks vaguely like a surfboard. I’ve been using UV resin and have added a little MEKP so I could do the repairs at night.

More advice needed though folks…

For some reason, despite the fact that I’ve added MEKP to the resin when doing the post-glassing patch-up, it doesn’t seem to want to set hard. I went back last night to sand back the edges in preparation for the hotcoat but the resin (used in the patch-ups) is still tacky in most places. At the nose it has barely hardened at all. Is this because I haven’t used enought MEKP? I only used about 30mL (1oz) of resin, with UV catalyst incorporated, and added about 1mL of MEKP. Should I have added more, or is there a chance that the two catalysts somehow cancelled each other out, or at least dampened each other’s effect?

There aren’t going to be too many opportunities to get the board out in the sun this weekend - no sun and no time. It’s a bit of an unseasonably wet spring in Adelaide and I’m looking after the offspring this weekend while my wife puts in the hard yards backstage.

Help!?

colinIG · October 7, 2011, 10:37am

De nada CassS.

U have to add about 2.5 - 3% of catalyst even if the resin is UV cure. The UV resin without sun o UV lights doesn’t cure. Wait till next morning and put it in the sun. If you want to continue with this “shaping thing” buy a UV lamp (it’s what i’ll do).

When u repair put also styrene.

Even if there’s no sun u can use UV resin put like 1% mekp and the UV that penetrates the clouds will do the rest.

Cheers

CassS · October 9, 2011, 1:06am

I got an hour or so of sunlight yesterday morning and while the kids were off happily harassing the dog or eating dirt, I dragged the board out and managed to get all the tacky resin to cure properly.

I’ve now sanded it all back and am ready to do the hotcoat. Hopefully next weekend we won’t have anything on and I can get down to business. I really want to get this boat in the water and see how it goes.

CassS · October 22, 2011, 9:46am

I’ve finally got time to give an update on my progress, plus access to the computer. My wife’s studying at the moment and she monopolises the machine in the evenings, so it’s been difficult to get around to posting. Add to that our diabolically slow up/download rate cos we live in the country and you get the picture…

Anyway, I sweet-talked her into letting me disappear out to the shed for an hour last weekend and I managed to get the hotcoat on. Hoo-bloody-ray! It went on with no dramas and set like a dream. It came as quite a surprise just how differently it behaved to the lam coat - Set hard in a couple of minutes and hung down in curtains from the tape around the edges, which I cut off with the blade of a stanley knife before it fully hardened, as I’ve seen described so many times on this site.

As you can see on the picture above, there’s a fair bit of resin accumulated around the tail. I’d seen in a couple of threads that you shouldn’t make the rail too sharp on the blank, because that would cause air bubbles to form when you did the lamination. So I rounded the rails on the blank and laid the tape so it would create a raised lip around the edge of the tail when the hotcoat went on. I’m planning to sand this down quite heavily, but I put it there so I could make a nice sharp edge, which would then soften as it gets further along the rail line. The rail starts to round off just forward of the front of where the fin will go.

Here are a few more shots of the board post-hotcoat…

CassS · October 22, 2011, 11:19am

After I put the hotcoat on, I waited a couple of days then ventured out one evening during the week to install the fin box. I got an 8-inch box from Shapers Australia, but in hindsight I should have gone longer so I could experiment a bit more with fin placement, but whatever…

Once again using advice gleaned from Swaylock’s, I decided on placement by laying the fin down flat on the board, with the bottom of it (where it would meet the deck once installed, not the bottom of the block that sits inside the fin box) running along the stringer. I slid it forwards until a third of the fin stuck out over the rail, with the other two-thirds inside the rail line. This ended up being about 6.5" up from the tail, which was the upper end of where others on this site have said to place a single fin. With this in mind, I marked out a placement about 1/2" back from here, which would allow me to slide the fin around between 5.5-7 inches (5.5" as far back as it goes, 7" as far forward).

Well, in another first for me, I laid out the area I needed to cut out, got out my flash new laminate trimmer/router and proceeded to gouge into the bottom of the board. I did it in two stages because the bit I have for this machine isn’t particularly deep. The first went well enough, but somehow, halfway through the second run, the nut holding the depth gauge in place came loose and the bit slipped down without me noticing - rookie mistake, I know. I think it was how I was holding the machine. I had to really wrestle with it to keep it cutting the stringer. It kept wanting to slide off into the easier foam.

I ended up cutting about 7-10mm deeper that I’d intended, meaning that there was only about 5mm between the bit and the deck of the board once I’d finished. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could have heard me swearing over in the northern pacific. I wasn’t happy.

But I got philosophical about it (eventually). It’s my first board and I was bound to make some mistakes. At least I didn’t go through to the deck… I hope this hasn’t compromised the structural integrity of the board’s tail though. I have made an attempt to compensate by laying two layers of 4oz glass into the cavity when I put the box in. I can’t get rid of this nagging feeling that the first time I take a late drop on anything overhead the tail will just snap clean off beneath my back foot.

In the interest of keeping this short story from becoming a novel, I’ll cut this post off here. More photos of fin box installation and all the dramas that entailed with follow.

CassS · October 22, 2011, 11:25am

As promised, more photos, less text.

My wife has a theory that when you start fucking up when you’re making something, you should stop, put down your tools and go do something else. I wish I’d listened to her…

So I’ve got this deeper that expected hole for a fin box. I need to set up the box so it doesn’t end up deeper than the surface of the board. I put the fin in the box, planning to run tape from rail to rail over the apex to hold it vertical while the resin set. I then taped all around its base to keep the resin out of the box and set a paddle pop stick at either end, perpendicular to the box, so it would go no deeper than the top of the box into the cavity. Sort of like this diagram…

I flipped the board and routed a hole through for the legrope string to come out. I’m not going to install a deck plug for the legrope, but rather go with the hole through the finbox, out through the deck and fill with resin. Less-to-zero chance of the rope pulling the plug out on a heavy wipeout.

I taped off this hole, flipped the board back over and set up for dropping the box in. I cut out two pieces of 4oz cloth - one about the dimensions of the base of the cavity, the other big enough to sit well clear of the top once the box was in. After that it was just a matter of grabbing the leftover hotcoat resin (UV Catalysed, still good), adding MEKP at the lower end of the requirement scale for a slow set, and pouring in enough to cover the bottom of the hole. I then laid the first, smaller strip of glass into the hole and made sure it was wet through before…

Hang on, forgot to tape sheets of baking paper down to stop the overflow from making a mess of the board’s tail. Went back, did this, prepared to pour more resin in, lay the second sheet of glass over the hole and insert fin box…

Hang on, forgot to add white pigment to resin. Shit! Added pigment to unpoured resin, poured a little of this into the hole, making sure to fold back the wet glass layer so pigmented resin went through into legrope plug channel, refolded wet glass over, mixed white resin with clear, poured more white resin into cavity and mixed as well as I could in there. Laid second sheet of glass over the hole and in goes the box.

15 seconds after the box goes in and the resin pushes up out either side, the tape sealing the inside of the box starts pulling loose and the whole thing starts sinking into the deeper-than-intended hole under the weight of the fin. Meanwhile I’ve got white resin all over my gloves and I’m pussy-footing around trying not to get it all over the beautiful green fin, while at the same time swearing my head off trying to stop the finbox from filling up with rapidly gelling white fucking resin.

Obviously, with all this going on, there was no time to take photos, and I didn’t want to get that bloody white resin all over the camera as well. But here’s another photo of the board as it sits now, post installation dramas. This is the resin plug from which the legrope string will emerge. It’s about the size of an Aussie 10c piece.

Once the resin began to gel in earnest, I cut off the excess glass sticking out around the box, ripped off the baking paper to get rid of most of the messy excess resin and changed my gloves. I then carefully removed the fin, trying not to get resin all over it and also trying not to move the box around and mess up the bond that was underway. So much for trying to keep it vertical, my main concern was just keeping the resin from filling the box and setting, making the whole thing useless.

Swearing at myself under my breath, I let the resin set some more then set about digging out all the half-set resin that had seeped into the box. I think I managed to get about 98% of it out eventually. By then the resin was about 2/3 set and I took a deep breath and went in for a closer look. Oh fuck - The bloody fin box wasn’t in straight! I’d spent so much time concentrating on stopping the box from filling up that I hadn’t paid enough attention to making sure it was fucking straight. Once again, that howling you Californians heard about a week and a half back in the middle of the day wasn’t the echo of mountain wolves, it was me in my shed in South Australia, cursing myself every way I knew (and some that I made up on the spot).

But it’s not too bad (he says, allowing self-delusion to set in). It’s only about 3mm out of alignment and hopefully that won’t make too much difference to the board’s overall performance. God knows, I’ll spend most of my time surfing waist to chest-high slop on it, the curse of the Adelaide surfer, unless you want to drive 8 hours to the middle of bloody nowhere. You try convincing my wife that a trip to the desert would be great in the middle of an SA summer…

So now I’m all set to break out the sander and clean it all up. I’m planning to do 80, 180, 240, 320 grade paper using the electric sander, then maybe 400 and even maybe 600 wet/dry by hand.

Do you think 600 is excessive? Could I leave it at 400?

I honestly can’t be bothered attempting a gloss coat and to be frank, I don’t think the board’s worth the effort. Perhaps further down the line when I make something I’m really happy with.

Another novel, sorry, but it feels better once it’s out. I don’t dwell on it then, I can just get on with it again. And hopefully some of you out there will get a laugh out of my amateurish antics.

CassS · October 26, 2011, 4:17am

Holy sh$t, I’ve finished!

After many long nocturnal hours under the glow of one lonely incandescent bulb, a great deal of creative cursing and god knows how much backtracking, I now have a new surfboard in my quiver. It’s been an brilliant journey and an incredibly steep learning curve, but I’m stoked with the outcome and it’s definitely just the first of many.

I don’t have any photos of the finished product because it was 10pm by the time I finished sanding last night and I don’t think the flash on my point-&-shoot would do the board justice, so I’ll wait until the weekend when I can get some daylight snaps.

I’ve come to the conclusion that other than the router, the power sander
is a novice shaper’s worst enemy. It’s such a fine line between
perfection and “Bugger”, and you’ll cross it nearly every time if you’re not familiar with the tool in your hand. I abandoned the sander after almost ruining the hotcoat when I ground down the buildup around the tail and the finbox. I exposed the weave in about three places and just said “F&%k this, I’m doing it by hand”. These needed patching with extra resin, so the rest of the night was spent mixing in wax in styrene and MEKP then carefully dabbing it on over the effected areas.

The next night (last night), I came back and went at it with the padded sanding block and a progression of ever-finer grades of sandpaper. I ended up going right up to (wet) 600-grade wet/dry paper, to get that almost-gloss-coat finish.It’s hard work, but I find shaping the blank and sanding the glassed board by hand much more forgiving and I have far more control over the final product. I guess this might change as I get more familiar with the power tools, but it’s not like I’m working to a deadline or on a mass-production scale, so why hurry and increase the fuck-up risk by that much more.

The last job was to drill out the hole for the legrope string, down through the deck and out the base of the finbox, then installing a loop of nylon string pilfered from my wife’s sewing supplies. I gave it an all-over hosing to get rid of the dust and paste built up from the wet sanding then howled at the moon in excitement because it was finished!

So I guess this is just about the end of the thread, other than to add a few more photos of the finished product and perhaps one or two of it in action, if I can convince anyone to sit around on the rocks at Middleton waiting for me to catch a wave. Thanks Swaylock’s, for watching and for the pieces of advice and encouragement along the way. I’ll post some photos of future projects as they develop.

Huck · October 26, 2011, 7:02am

It was kinda fun for us watching over your shoulder - hope its the first of many more, and don't forget you promised more pics of the finished board. Cowabunga!

paulr · October 26, 2011, 9:41am

Hey Cass

Thanks for sharing your build with us. The best thing about the first board is getting it in the water for the first time. My first board was completed two years ago (a balsa Jensen-style HWS), and only had about 3 months of water time before it met its untimely demise (it took on a lot of water!) But I proved to myself that I could make a board that worked well enough for me to want to ride it regularly. Keep going with your board building as they will improve rapidly - my boards 2 and 3 (last summer) were much better than my first, and I’ve just started boards 4 and 5 for this summer, which I have high hopes for! (But it’s slow going, I know what it’s like to try to build a board with an hour or two spare here and there between young kids!)

Cheers
Paul