Will installing futures after the board has been laminated reduce their strength? I want to avoid having the shadow of the box under the opaque tint. I figure if I follow the regular installation procedure and add an extra footbal patch ( 3 total) there will still be 12oz of cloth over each box.
We do it like that all the time no problems. Figure the outermost of your “glass-overs” is going to get sacrificed during the sanding. It won’t hurt to have 3 layers with the largest top layer a 4oz patch that will get ground away when you re-open the boxes.
FYI: opaque and tint are two different things. Both are pigment. If you were using opaque, then you can sink the boxes in the shape as normal without much penalty. With translucent tint, the normal fin method looks bad, so go the clear glass-overs…HTH
I would imagine that installing them after words would reduce their strength. Adding an extra patch will add to the weight of the tail end of your board and still might not be as strong as glassing them in under the lam.
Here is an intersting point. I’ve worked in ding repair for a while and I’ve seen just as many ripped out future boxs as I have FCS, and I can say that a ripped out FCS plug is a darn sight easier and cheaper to fix.
D
I can vouch for PlusOne’s method. I picked up a super old board of his someone had snapped. Looks like they had taken pretty lousy care of it before the break as the foam was yellowed. I found it after it had been set out on a curb and someone had jumped up and down on it breaking it in smaller pieces. Pretty disrespectful, but the point is, one of the future fins had broken off in the box and even after all this the finboxes were in solid.
I have always put the boxes in after lam (before hot coat) and have never had any prob. I have also seen a lot of repair action and seen more probs with fcs than futures. I think mainly because fcs is secured to the body at 2 small points as opposed to future that is secured throughout the length of the base. better distribution of forces and all that.
if a future ever fails of course its a bigger mess to rout out and reinstall a new one but from my experience this is a rare case.
I like futures because of the ease of initiall instalation.
to each his (or her) own,
cheers
p.s.
I never worry about them showing. with a name like “ghetto boardz” ya get watcha get 
M