Hollow oak ready for glassing

General Discussion
1

Having seen some of the balsa wood boards on here lately I can’t wait to get this glassed and out of the way so that I can start trying to track down some balsa and having a go along that route.

Anyway, this is the progress so far on my lataest hollow. Just about ready to glass I think. Any suggestions for fin placement would be appreciated, I have made a pair of wood keel (ish) things for it with a 7" base and are 5 1/2" high. The board is a full seven foot, as opposed to the six and half foot it was intended as, still trying to work out how that happened.

Thanks

Jase (MMM)

496×1048 47.4 KB

788×931 60.2 KB

757×571 40 KB

2

Y’know, Red Oak is one of my favorite woods. It’s pretty, it steam-bends nice, and by the way your joinery is something to be quite proud of. But heaven alone knows it’s heavy - what’s it weighing in at now, before glassing?

The good news is you can very likely go light on your glass, just 'cos oak is such a nice, strong!! wood. Makes lovely framing for North Sea Trawlers among other things. Hearts of Oak isn’t just a song, it’s a statement.

You are also gonna find that it has a very nice, stiff character to it- paddle it or surf it through small chop and it’ll make a lovely high pitched sound, higher pitched than a foam board cos of the initial stiffness.

Also, the red oak is more porous than white oak, so that it’ll hold glass really well. Though I might give it a well-brushed-in layer of resin, ( lam resin if you’re not using epoxy ) and then bed your cloth in it, just so you’re getting it really well into the grain and pores of what is a very dense wood.

I dunno if I’d set that up as a keel-finned fish or a swallowtail thruster. Me, depending on how your rails are, I’d go with the tri. Based on the outline shape for the nonce.

Another trick, by the way, with oak is do your layout with a softwood ( clear pine is nice) batten,draw your lines and set your blocks on a bending jig, then steam your oak and make it conform to the line the pine gave you. Use blocks offset if need be, overbend so you can allow for springback as it cools.

A steamer isn’t hard to rig, an electric kettle and a hose to an insulated PVC pipe minimum, and then you get up into the boatbuilder grade stuff with big propane burners and boxes and drains and all that fun and games like I have, meant to bend 2" or better ( 5cm) oak to some damned tight curves. Bigger if you’re patient: the rule of thumb is 1 hr per 1 square inch of cross section, but for thin stuff go lighter. Steam thin oak ( 6mm to 12mm) right and you can almost tie a knot in it.

hope that’s of use - again, lovely work, man, enjoy

doc…

3

Beautiful work there FBLA!!

Once the resin hits that it’s going to look fantastic, doesn’t matter about the extra 6", probably float you a bit better…

4

holy wowie kazowie fatman !

…that’s too nice a board to surf … do what that other guy did , and put four legs on it .

(It would make such a NICE table , mate ! … )

ben

5

fabulous looking board, do you glass with epoxy or poly, how thick is the oak and where do you get it from, what is the weight before glassing, pete

6

Cheers Doc,

I feel a bit of a fraud now as it is only oak faced ply not solid planks of, I figured that solid oak would be too much of a struggle for my puny arms to carry from the car to the water. At the moment I’d guess at around 14 lb as it feels lighter than my last board at this stage but I’ll weigh it later, I’m curious now.

Think I might go with the tri set up as well, I had made the keels from beech and cherry (match the nose wedge) but have plenty of that wood left so no problem there.

The tip with the lam resin before the glass is well helpfull, I was a bit concerned about whether the grain would fill through the glass layer ok. So do I lay the glass cloth on before it sets up and then re-coat straight away? I’m not looking forward to the glassing as this is only the 2nd board I’ve done and had some real problems with the glassing last time, though I think I’ve got better resin this time round.

Thanks again Doc

Jase (MMM)

7

Cheers Pete

The “oak” is only really oak faced ply but looks nice and is a bit lighter than the solid stuff. I’ve only done one board before this one and am not able to justify the expense of epoxy to the wife yet, so poly it is. Plan on wighing later…let you know.

Jase (MMM)

8

thats quite a coool board… looks fishy

has a kind regency period feel to it

or Edwardian surfboard

9

hi Jason !

…is epoxy a LOT more expensive than polyester resin in England then ?

That’s a pity , because the extra working time I have seen ‘Hicksy’ have glassing his wood boards with the epoxy has meant he can do a really nice job .

…if you CAN afford it , I would say go for it with epoxy …I don’t think you would regret having a nicer finish , in the end …

[bear in mind …this is coming from me, who until now has used polyester resin , exclusively , too !]

ben

10

Hey, Jase-

Not a fraud at all- with oak running around 50-55 lbs/cu ft ( compared to sea water at around 64, pine at around 25-30 and balsa usually under 20 and sometimes as low as 8 ) - solid oak would barely float itself. And while oak makes a really nice framework, in a veneer form I have found it to be a little fragile. The ply is a very good choice.

Might be interesting to weigh it now and at various stages through the process, to get a handle on where the weight comes from and all.

Beech and cherry - my #2 and #3 favorite woods, in fact my present to myself when I moved in here some 22 years ago was an 8’ copper beech tree, which is now around 50’ high; beautiful thing, kinda helps you understand the Druids… As a tri configuration, it’ll be mighty pretty too.

Anyhow- what we do, granted it’s in the boat business, is lay on a good, well brushed-in coat of resin, so it penetrates the pores of the wood and gives a good mechanical bond. Then, if possible, lay the cloth ( or fiberglass mat as we usually use on boats ) onto the wet resin and then roll in resin to saturate the cloth. Though with lam resin this isn’t as necessary - we often use waxed sanding-type resin on boats, so we tend to have wet layups on top of wet resin all the time, so it’ll bond well without having to sand between.

The problem with laying cloth into your brushed-on coat is this: on a boat, it’s pretty much flat surfaces, not the compound curves you get on a board, especially near the rails, so that wrinkles and bubbles would be a problem and one that’d be compounded ( pardon the pun) by the ‘bonding coat’ hardening fairly quickly and really limiting the time you have to work with it and possibly some very ugly consequences…

I think I’d concentrate on getting a well-brushed bonding coat on there, fairly thin and as smooth as possible, then worry about laying the glass on the board after it’s hardened.The lam resin should bond to the lam resin just fine, and the ply is giving you good skin strength anyhow, this is more for abrasion resistance and sealing as anything else.

hope that’s of use

doc…

11

That is such a sweet looking board!! and I agree with chip, use epoxy.

hope you can talk your wife into using epoxy…

12

Hey Jase that’s a very nice looking board. Hope my third one goes as nice as your second. What kind of rails? Any concave or something curved in deck/bottom? I’m planning on doing a board with domed deck and slightly curved bottom, but I’m not sure about the bending properties of the plywood I use.

Regarding fin setup, I think 3 fin is the way to go (too bad, I hate thruster setups), you can save the keels for a fish with a more classical outline and dimensions.

What are the dimensions of the board? Did you try something different while building it? Any modifications to the Jensen’s directions?

Jack

13

Excellent stuff Doc, that’s really helpful.

The board should be pretty strong as I’d given the inside a layer of carbon fibre around where the joints are.

I can imagine what would happen now if I attempted to lay the cloth on to wet resin…Oooohhh dear! Yup, deffinately wait for it to go off first then.

Copper beech trees are so loveley there are quite a few huge ones where I live, my garden isn’t big enough for one so I had to settle for an Acer palmatum atropurpureum, which has leaves of a very similar colour, or should have, all mine fell off a couple of weeks ago. I was going to put a leaf from it in the glass on the board. Oh well!

Boat building eh? Now there’s a proper job.

Thanks again

Jase (MMM)

14

Hi Jase;

Carbon fibre- ooooh yeah, that’ll do it fine. Actually, I know an 87 year old guy who would be slick at glassing into wet resin. Though he’s the one that taught me how to set up gaff rigs and lay a canvas deck into wet paint. It’d be tricky, though, best not to.

Japanese maple? Pretty tree. The thing is that I grew up with a Red Beech, so when I finally got a place of my own where I was gonna stay for good, I had to have one. Didn’t do much for maybe 10 years, but then the taproot hit the groundwater and it took off. In fact…

I hadn’t measured it so far this year. So, broke out the sextant and the long tape measure. I’m a boat guy, I have to have a sextant, part of the mystique and all that, though a protractor and a stick would do as well without all the nautical balderdash…

Tangent of 33.5° is sin 33.5°/cos 33.5°, so multiplying the baseline length by the tangent gives me 49.64 feet; 50 feet high, close enough for a cloudy day.

Was around 44 high last year, so at this rate I may see it hit 100 feet. Something to look forward to…

doc…

15

Cheers dude.

perhaps I can convince her that the next board is for her and make something up like “epoxy will make it lighter and therefore easier to carry to the water”.

I saw the pic of your balsa board on some thread yesterday, I’ve still a way to go to be in the same league I think.

Jase (MMM)

16

Hey Fat,

That’s a really beautiful job. You should be proud. As mentioned, the grain will really “pop” once you get it glassed. An epoxy job will prolly give you more abuse power, but an poly with a nice gloss job would make it show-time. Good work!

PS: Your post name doesn’t match the class of your boards…I’d go with “smooth as glass”, as it rymes anyway.

17

Hey Doc,

I said that there were some pretty huge Copper beeches around here, I take it back they’re bonzai by comparison. Looking forward to seeing 100 ft?, I’m just hoping that the acer keeps its leaves for more than a fortnight next year, aparently I need to re-plant the poor thing.

I take it that “gaf rigs and laying canvas deck into wet paint” are tricks of the boat building trade?

What sort of boats do you construct? Big buggers or fast buggers?

I remembered to weigh the board tonight, I was only 1/2 lb out with my guess. It’s coming in at 14 1/2 lb on my bathroom scales though I’m not sure how reliable they are as they say that I’m still 11 stone 4.

Cheers

Jase (MMM)

18

Thanks Richard

Kind of humbled here as I’d had a look at your site the other day and saw the chambered balsa that you had created. That is surely the most beautiful board in existance. One could get lost in that nose block, in fact I did for about 15 minutes. What sort of wood is that? the colour is so deep and warm.

The pics of mine are all taken at a great enough distance to hide the flaws.

Yeah, that post name. I was thinking it was time to change that.

Thanks again

Jase (MMM)

19

Hey FBLA,

You mean that you missed those Acer leaves AGAIN!!!..

You were going to do that to your first board, are you hopeless or what…

Come on son get your act into gear and tell your wife that there’s no poly in the UK due to a freighter sinking or something, go for Epoxy mate, your wife won’t smell it…

Looks like you’re having fun though…

20

Hey, Jase;

Read someplace that copper beeches can get up to 120 feet, and some a few towns over sure did close to that, huge trees. Also, here on Cape Cod, there’s a couple of sizable forests of American beeches - very pretty places too. This might be ideal climate and soil for 'em, sandy with good water and all that. This one is only about 16-18 inches in diameter about a foot off the ground and growing in the midst of a bunch of taller trees, so it’s shot straight up.

Sounds like some sort of deficiency around your maple? That or some kinds of soil critters? I’d keep an eye on that -

Boat work, I mainly do commercial fishing boat work, wood ones, so I guess you could say they are big ol’ slabs.

Canvas, you put on top of a lightly built deck on a boat or a cabin top…or you would have, back in the old days… that you wanted to keep waterproof. Actually an unbleached muslin is the ticket. The paint is to seal it and bond it to the wood.

As for gaff rig - http://www.oldgaffersassociation.org/contents.html is more in your neighborhood, while http://198.166.215.5/nsarm/virtual/bluenose/ch9.asp?SearchList1=9&Language=English is closer to mine.

Old style, it is, but still works well.

doc…