I am going to glass a pu blank with hemp cloth. I haven’t actually seen the cloth yet.
But I know it’s only 45 cm(about18")wide.The board is 6’ and I’ve got 8 meters of the cloth.
Should I lay two pieces next to each other at the stringer or maybe one piece in the middle
and two narrower pieces at each side to cover the rails?
Any suggestions?
thats a difficult situation. What weight is your cloth and how flexible is it? The thing about hemp is that most cloth will refuse to wrap the rail. I would do a tester on an old board to see how it is going to perform on the rails. With that width of cloth you might want to consider doing full size deck patches of the hemp, then wraping the rails with 6 oz. fiberglass. Also, you might want to consider buying the 5.7 oz. hemp that Ecolution produces. It comes in 50" widths and will wrap rails with a little elbow grease. (I’ve found a three inch paint roller works best for the laps). Good luck.
Hmmm, may I suggest glassing the board with 6oz cloth and doing a hemp deck? You could even do a hemp bottom also. Wrapping hemp cloth (or any cloth) around the rails is a major drag. Not only that, hemp is extremely weak in comparison to fiberglass. A surfboard partially depends on nice strongly glassed rails for some of it’s overall strength. Also, I’ll warn you now, it’s really frigging heavy! Hemp cloth sucks up resin like theres no tomorrow. If you do decide to wrap the rails with hemp, try doing some test pieces first, and I would suggest using epoxy, for the added strength and especially for the extended work time (you’ll need it.) I think you’ll probably want to do a bunch of cuts in the cloth around the rail, so that the cloth can overlap on it self, otherwise it won’t want to bend around the rail, and lay flat. Good luck! -Carl