Hey Stoneburner
Ghetto Rat has dropped enough names of the people and places he’s worked at as
well as the area that he lives in for you to figure out who he is and to show
that he’s dedicated his whole life to being the best at his craft as possible.
So what if his delivery of constructive criticism is a little bit harsh,
I don’t know what your day job is but if you worked your whole life to be the
best fine cabinet maker possible and then a kid in his final year of high
school was telling you that a Tee Joint and a Nail Gun was the best way to make
a dining room table you might apply some rough criticism.
VH set himself up to
fail by upon joining the site immediately attacking long time respected
members who are known for spending their whole life in the profession. The validity of his posts are non-existent
because so far, after just **6months**!!
and 138 posts (that’s a lot of talking) all we know is that he can cut some xps
out and make a rocker table in his living room.
He consistently sets
himself up for ‘Goading’ by continuously making outrages claims such as he’s
been vac bagging boards for 30 years like a legend but doesn’t even have one board from such a long history of board building and aquiring all this knowledge??!!. Or his boards are
so advanced and top secret that they risk having their intellectual property
stolen? More top secret than Bert Berger? Than Coil? Than Dynocore? Than
Speedneedle??
Van Helsing we don’t care for your identity and we’re not
going to rip into you surfboards if you post a picture, my boards are far from perfect
too. Just put your money where your
giant mouth is, show your cards and prove you’re not bluffing. ****
I didn’t see a raw blank with holes in it (or the spikey roller), but he did show me a cross section and the spikes looked around 1mm in diameter and penetrated nearly 10mm into the surface of the foam.
stoneburner,
asking someone to prove their claim is not hijacking a thread.
Speculating on a build method with no substance, proof or idea of what you are
talking about could also be defined as Hijacking a thread since you may be
steering everyone in completely the wrong direction.
Criticism
is good, you can’t improve if you are not aware of your flaws, how will you see
pure outline curves if you think your wonky ones are ok?But
you guys take immediate offence to criticism and burn any possible
bridge to someone who might be able to steer you in the right direction.
This is
the best surfboard forum because some of the long time (I wont say old ha! )
industry guys are still here steering people in the right direction.
Without them you have a hollow forum where nobody knows what they are doing and
nobody posts build pictures because they only made 3 surfboards back in high
school in 1974, called it a day but still think it appropriate to tell people
how to glass xps foam based on something they read on the internet.
Sways
also has valuable people with great insite such as engineers (thanks Lemat for
your posts), computer programmers, glassers, suppliers ect ect
It’s a
great forum because kooks, newbies and bullshit artists get shut down or at
least challenged by their outreages claims. The forum is self-moderating, that
is what gives it its strength.
Sending
aggressive, rude PM’s is weak and pathetic. Issues should be discussed in
the open so everyone can see where people stand.
Thanks Jamie and most interesting because you wouldn’t think that the resin wouldnt absorb thru such thin holes and under vac you’d guess the resin would be drawn to the surface and not into the core. Most interesting.
I’ll bet that they use a kind of “gun” to plant fiber fin in core because holes position is random.
I don’t really understand what is protected by the patent: make hole in blank filled with epoxy resin and fiberglass before lam ? if it is it’s a joke ! Nobody can’ tmake eps boards anymore without paying hydroflex LOL.
I remember i saw them doing their first bufo proto in france. A that time they vac bag epoxy lam on PU stringerless blank made by surfoam (french blanks). But board buckle and delam, then they move to XPS foam, they leave machine cut coarse surface but board buckle and delam tehn they develop hydroflex tech but board still buckle and delam then they move to eps, still buckle they had now UD fiber tape on stringerless.
From my small, but longtime, experience, unless you make stiff skins enough, stringerless boards ended by buckling. Even those with reinforced rails (and light skins).
I read the entire patent, and to have spent the going rate of $10K to get this patented is absurd. The laminating technique only produces greater stiffness, and isn’t anything new either. I remember back in the 80’s some people were scoring blanks with everything from wax combs and pitch forks to spiked rollers for both stiffness and adhesion. So even if you were to successfully laminate per the patent and the result is a really stiff board, just how much more stiffness could be had by the inflation feature? Even if you could impact the stiffness by inflation, it would have to be regulated every time the external temperature of the board changed by more than 5 degrees.
Find out what it costs for the licensing and equipment, because that’s where the only profit is generated. If you want a gimmick and a name to sell boards, then you need to be on the scale of surftech or tufllite to make a difference in the market place. Look at Firewire, and they even had a valid design but still weren’t financially successful.
So why do this stuff like Hydroflex? It’s pretty easy to find some sucker to put up venture capital, there’s plenty of wealthy folks who don’t want to invest in the stock market or real estate these days. You get $20K from them and deliver up a patent that costed $10K and later say “sorry, it didn’t sell and you know that all investments are at risk”. These scams have always been around, just more now in this economy.
As it was explained to me, they filled the holes with resin in a separate step BEFORE they vac bagged the glass on. Anyway, the whole thing doesn’t get me too excited one way or another. A good epoxy hand-layup on PU or plain ol’ vac bag lam seems more efficient and plenty strong.
a picture from their facebook-page showing a crossection with partially removed eps foam: The fibres on the deck side seem to go deeper in the foam than the fibres on the bottom side:
Just looked at this thread the first time, and its kind of funny somehow I got dragged through the mud, by the same guy, but hey its mud-wrestling, and well its fun to watch - I guess. The first Hydroflex board I saw was Chris Ward’s board a few years ago, his daughter Malia had it, there were a few dings in the rails, and I thought at that point it wouldn’t hold air.
Fast forward to yesterday when I saw my friend Brad’s wife and secretary of Hydroflex, Sandy at the local taqueria, because having returned from the Florida Tradeshow she was craving guacamole. First off she is as sweet a person as I have ever met, and didn’t reveal any secrets because I wasn’t prying, and don’t really care about what they are doing. She did say that 90% of the boards they are building now don’t have the pump/vents in them and they are glassing PU’s there as well utilizing they’re “proprietary” technology.
For the record, I don’t drop names to ingratiate myself as some type of social-psycology experiment; its just so if anyone cares they can validate whatever I care to rant about at the time.
What I appreciate about this place is a shared passion for making surfboards which is evident by most of our communities postings; still I have an opinion which has been developed over a lifetime, and not learned on the internet.
I encourage everyone to experiment on surfboard construction techniques and never stop; furthermore I consider it an honor and a privilege to have worked with some of the best, and to consider many of them friends, and to share some of what I have learned from them, and yet what is most enjoyable around here seems to be mud-wrestling. I do hope that everyone enjoys my postsbecause I do try to fashion them in a way as to be both informative and funny. And really some of the stuff people post up here is hilarious.
I also saw and talked to the people from Hydroflex at the Surf Expo. Getting resin into the blank would make for a better bond It would also create a stronger blank surface that would help with lessening heal dents on your board.
Personally I don't see much value in the air injection system.
The Hydroflex people did say they are doing contract glassing for a couple of different companies like Firewire and claim to have done about 1000 boards in their Oceanside facility. They also hinted at a secret sauce resin recipe of some sort.
It cost a lot of money to get a Patent. But that money spent on a Patent is one thing. It's still up to you to spend even more money to defend your Patent. If you can't aford to defend it it is basicly worthless. It;s the same with trade marks.
This is why some people have been producing boards under well known surfboard brands from the past.
Just read this new version of the patent: It’s a joke ! They patented power rods and other Omega or Delta stringers used in windsurf for 20 years LOL.
It’s like fiberflex wich patented carbon rails, everyone make carbon rails surfboards and don’t care of their patent because carbon rails exists well before their patent.
After all everyone does what he wants with his money !
Apparently the 99% are expected to accept the opinion of the 1% based on hearsay. There is only one true path. This has a familiar ring to it, so stimulating.
Mr. Marsh, thank you for the enlightenment. My newfound clarity is profound …
If it makes you feel better Rodent, my post was not about you. It was/is about hypocrisy. Dragged? Mud? LMAO
BTW some of us know VH. He seems proficient at his chosen technology. You will have to accept our word for it …
After all this tripe VH, I hope you feel like posting photographs of your completed project. Start a new thread. Do not bury it here.
That’s a reference to their patent, they are claiming alot of area here, and their patent is amazingly vague and broad. What are your opinions about it?
Intertesting thread. Thanks for posting it, though one could argue that of the 6 pages posted so far, about 4 are wasted on ‘off topic’ nonsense. Comes with the territory, I guess.
Duh, Florian its been so long and no one has really talked about the patent except lemat, so I thought I would put it up another way, and maybe someone would actually read it, and you said you’ld “write a small summary soon,” but you have not, I guess that’s the point I am missing. So do it.
