Bonjour !
How would you guys make en environmentally friendly board, when costs do not matter much?
Aloha
Blank made from cork.Glue in 3 wood stringers.Route a deep slot and glue in a wood fin.Coat with pine tar pitch.The cork doesn’t need a skin,its waterproof anyway.smack it with a hammer and the dent bounces back.Pine Pitch has been used for around a thousand years to waterproof boats.You could also use a good linseed or tung oil based spar varnish.The best varnishes come from Holland.I have already played around with cork and it is great stuff making a huge comeback.It is self generating…harvested from the bark of trees.Check it on the internet and be amazed.
I’d shape it out of a pickle. A big kosher dill, a Vlasic or something. Wouldn’t have to glass it , so that would be good for the Environs. They don’t seem to absorb much juice when they’re in the jar. Obviously they only come in one color, Green. So cosmetically that would be a drawback. But the limited color range satisfies the " Green Board " classification. If you don’t like the vinegar-pickle juice smell, wax it up with a bar of Zog’s sex wax(fragarance of your choice). The obvious advantage is the potential to satisfy the munchies when your out at your local break. I’d say an all around great idea! McDing
back when I used to garden a lot, I bought some hybrid zucchini seeds. The seeds were huge, and purple. The plants came up, and they had leaves the size of a newspaper. Strange… Well, we grew a lot of zucchini, way more than we could eat. So some of them just stayed in the garden and got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Also, woodier - you couldn’t eat them. We ended up using one as a doorstop, it was indestructible.
So, with a little recombinant DNA research, or just some old fashioned cross-breeding, you could probably grow a squash big enough to surf on… oh, yeah, they are green too, with some nice stripes. Makes them look faster… (pickles would flex too much.)
A friend of mine is a “green” construction worker. He makes wooden boards with cork foam. He uses Resin Research Epoxy to seal them, though.
The first few were kinda heavy, but he’s playing with the skin (wood) thickness to get them down in the 6-7 lbs range. Anyway, if you are interested in talking to him, email me and I’ll pass it along to him.
Or, maybe, he reads here sometimes, he might see it. His boards are impressive efforts.
While you could go with one approach, making a board out of materials that’d come from renewable resources, is easily recycled and so forth, another way of looking at the problem would be to make something that wasn’t gonna break or break down, delam or die.
Is it better to have a board that uses X amount of finite resources, causes Y amount of pollution in the making and requires Z amount of energy to make it… or have something that takes/uses five times as much and lasts ten times as long?
Something that’s made better in the first place, that somebody takes good care of, it tends to last pretty good. In the same way, a board built strong in the first place, kept in a padded bag and not just heaved into the back of the truck, that had all dings fixed right and fixed promptly, that board is gonna last quite a while, no?
Just another way of lookin’ at it…
doc…
I recently saw the Jack McCoy film Blue Horizon. After the show I was talking with Jack and he mentioned some technique David Rastovich was using to make all natural boards. I cant recall exactly how he described it, but it was something to do with laminating with wood skins, I forget what the actual blank was made of. He said to look it up on the web but so far I havent found anything about it. I also remember hearing about an old school cat that experimented with natural surfboards back in the day and eventually went back to urethane but I cant remember who (what can I say? my memory sucks). But for whatever its worth, Ive definitely heard mention a couple times of people experimenting with natural materials, and going on what Jack McCoy said, Rasta seems to be onto something.
Rob
Keith —My mind is expanding on this zucchini thing! I’m thinking you may be on to something. I mean a striped, pithy zuchini 9’6"… How 'bout this, glass the sucker with hemp! McDing
Thanks for the plug blakestah.I’ve been building some boards using a wood frame over the past two years. I’m in the process of making a completely environmentally concious board. My latest is a hollow wood 6’3" high performance fish. Laminated with 6oz. hemp fiber and resin research epoxy, which I must thank greg loehr for his amazing epoxy and coaching me through the hemp process. This is my sixth hollow wood. I’ve been riding it for about two months now and it performs. It weighs in just under nine pounds. Not kelly slater weight, but then again I’m not kelly slater. These boards last. two years riding ocean beach on my first one and not a single pressure ding. I’m looking to replace the petrochemical based epoxy with something along the soy or vegetable oil based. I would be grateful for any knowledge along those lines. I’m hoping to post my latest three boards as soon as the resources are up again. I’f you would like to talk shop please email me at danielphess@yahoo.com
sometimes you have to lock your car doors or else people will go putting zucchini in it. how about a board out of reeds tied together in a bundle? Ra
Rob, check this out
http://www.swaylocks.com/cgi-bin/discussion/archive.cgi/read/49541
There was an article in Surfing or Surfer last Fall about it too.
Down in the South there are people that grow these things called Gourds.THey are some kind of squash that they dry out…really light and tough.They sell lots of them.Someone has actually learned hot to Grow them into specific forms using some kind of a mold or something.Anyone for a crop of 6’4" Gourds???I saw one that was something like 8feet long.
I say we try to cross breed one of Keith’s Zuc’s with a goard. If we could get huge edible hollow veggies we’d be on to somethin. All we need to do is rout holes in the mini zepplins, fill them with expando foam, slide our feet and hands into the contraptions and were set! I can see it now, sliding down the face on all fours, conforming and contorting to the wave better and faster than one of Dale’s rafts. Lookout! going left, comming down at ya!..Err, i haven’t figured out the paddling out part yet, maybe it’s a 2 man tow board type operation.
Thanks for the inspiration. I’m on it. I’ll post pics when I take off on my first 3xOH bomb.
Ya, you’d have to watch out for the environmentalists, though, I saw a bunch of them up near San Onofre marching around with signs “NO ZUKES” – although, their handwriting wasn’t all that good…
over and (vegging) out…
Quote:
http://www.bamboosurfboards.com.au/ maybe with a cork blank and hemp glass?
Funny you should mention them - I got an email last week from a guy who had one with a major delam that needed fixing, his second bamboo board with the same problem - and he’d gotten no answers or indeed any reply at all from the bamboo board people. The bamboo is ( at least theoreticly ) a reinforcing fiber, the same way hemp is sometimes used, and in reality is more of a decor item ( 'cos you wind up glassing over it like any other decorative fabric inlay ) .
Could be why the bamboo boards website hasn’t been updated in over a year and why they don’t answer emails, and why their European distributor’s site has as ‘NEWS’ the arrival of the 2003 models. I think they’ve gone belly up, the product didn’t meet up with the ( rather wildly optomistic, in my far-from-humble opinion) expectations.
Hope that’s of use
doc…
i ve got a bamboo board - it looks beautiful and it seems strong. only thing is the weight of it - it’s much heavier than a traditional pu board of the same dimensions. Shame that their marketing dep claimed lighter - stronger but heavier is nearer the mark.
Maybe they should just try and make a similar strength and same weight as pu + appeal to those who care about the environment - there really should be enough of us who care altho these days it seems surfers are further from caring than ever.
Strange really - I think it’s a result of the marketing - lumping surfing together with environmentally destructive sports such as dirtbiking and jetskiing under the umbrella of “extreme sports”. Personally I think they should be thought of polar opposites - just my 1.2 p
Quote:
back when I used to garden a lot, I bought some hybrid zucchini seeds. The seeds were huge, and purple. The plants came up, and they had leaves the size of a newspaper. Strange… Well, we grew a lot of zucchini, way more than we could eat. So some of them just stayed in the garden and got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Also, woodier - you couldn’t eat them. We ended up using one as a doorstop, it was indestructible.
So, with a little recombinant DNA research, or just some old fashioned cross-breeding, you could probably grow a squash big enough to surf on… oh, yeah, they are green too, with some nice stripes. Makes them look faster… (pickles would flex too much.)
Well, if you going to go that route, why not take it a step further. Just figure out that DNA stuff and start growing sqaush that are the shape of surfboards. Just program all the dimensions into the DNA and you have a custom boards. Most of us try to make our surfboards look organic anyway.
I would assume that by the time you are concentrating your efforts on a greener surfboard, you have already taken care of the larger usages / products in your life that contribute vastly more harm to the environment than one 6-8 lb. surfboard per year, such as:
you live off the power grid, using only renewable energy.
your car is made of 100% recycled metals and no plastic, and runs on vegtable oil. Most cars I have ever driven weigh more than a lifetime supply of “green” boards would, and most use as much gasoline in 2 or 3 trips to the beach as you would use to make a regular surfboard.
your workplace is also off the grid, and doesn’t use paper or produce anything that needs to be transported using gasoline or electricity.
You have a hemp computer and cell phone (non-green computers and cell phones contribute horrible toxins to landfills, and are toxic to manufacture to boot)
Now, let’s say you could make a green board, that costs 1,000 dollars in materials, and takes 50 man-hours to construct. Are you really being more environmentally friendly than someone who makes a long-lasting epoxy board that costs $200 and takes 15 man-hours, then donates the extra money to an environmentally friendly charity and uses the extra 35 man-hours cleaning up the beach? The last time I cleaned up the beach, I hauled off about 50 pounds worth of trash, and it only took about two hours. 35 hours of that, and I would have collected 875 pounds of trash, taking out of nature enough material to equal 100 green boards. I think my net environmental gain would be larger than yours, even if you could make a 100% green board. At that point, your green board would be window-dressing, a cosmetic, holier than thou statement that really didn’t help much at all if you really add it all up.
I don’t see anything at all wrong with trying to make our lives more green, as long as we do it in a practical manner, tackling the largest issues first, and using common sense to evaluate if the changes we are making are really green, or just seem like it on the surface. In my opinion, surfboards are the aspect of our sport that contribute very little environmental damage, and are completely insignificant when stacked up against things like using fossil fuels to travel to the beach for example.
my 2c
I love ignore-nt comments…
I personally do live off from the grid, I work for an environmental engineering company and I drive a truck that is about to be converted to running off of veggie oils. See www.patagonia.com for more information.
With surfing being as huge as it is right now I don’t see why more people aren’t going for greener surfboards. Makes sense to me, but I’m probably just another disillusioned post-modern hippie.
peace