Just found a resin in a norwegian webshop. Gurit SP 115…ever heard of it? Claims to work well with surfboards.
Thanks:-) I guess I need to search a bit more in this forum before I write;-)
Heres how it turned out. The bumps you can see is just a little extra resin to fill out some small imperfections in the weave. And the q-cell area is a bit discolored from sanding out airbubbles and filling them over and over again. Finally water-proof. Gonna sand it and surf it soon I hope. Thanks a lot for the help guys.
So I went through this a few years ago. I had a heavily damaged board and I spent many weeks repairing it section by section. That is when I got on Swaylocks and learned a lot. I had a feeling that it would have been less work to build a new board so I built two. The first one, I bought a blank and tried to shape it a little. I glassed it with blue tinited RR epoxy and it came out OK. I think it is posted on here somewhere from back when i did. What i realized is that shaping was harder and more critical but I liked the idea of doing my own glassing and customizing the cosmetics. So for my second board, I asked Steve at Infinity if he would sell me a a fully shaped piece of foam for the board I had repaired. It was a 9 foot Secret Weapon. He told me that no one had ever asked him for that before and he was happy to do it. I painted the foam and glassed with clear RR epoxy and thanks to this forum, I learned how to polish the epoxy. That board came out really great. In fact, too great as I am reluctant to take it out and mess it up. I is also probably posted here somewhere.
So if you have done some heavy repairs, the jump to making your own is pretty simple as long as you get a pre-shaped blank. These days, a lot of the shops are CNC milling the blanks so once a design is validated, there is not much art to the shaping since the mill just cranks them out. See if you can get a CNC milled blank for the design you want and then do the glassing.
Just want to add a bit about Additive F from some recent experience. I had to fix one of my glider wings last month. There was a crack in a section that was simply carbon fiber. So I made up a very small amount of RR Kwik and put some over the cracked area. I noticed that the surface had a definite pattern to it. I had sort of forgot about Additive F having not used it in a long time. But then I remembered it and made up another small batch of Kwik and used my syringe method to add 0.1ml of F. It made a big difference in how the epoxy spread out. It flowed out to a virtually smooth even surface without any features that I could see with reflected light. So I am just saying it does make a difference in how the epoxy flows out.
Ah, cool! Bet it was exciting to start glassing that blank. Would be great to build my own surfboard someday. I still have a lot to learn about dingrepair, and especially about working with epoxy. Both shaping and glassing is such a fascinating craft.
Is it mostly surface-tension that makes fisheyes or contamination? If its surface-tension then it should help to lay a thicker layer of resin (without add F)? And that maby add F helps on thin layers? Only thinking out loud here;-)
I found my thread for the board I painted and glassed
https://www.swaylocks.com/forums/finished-my-second-board
Nice board! Good job:-) Got really shiny!
I have always done likewise, but recently went back and watched Loehr’s Epoxy 101 – Glassing --and watched as he used it in the Lam. A friend was using Dura Clear recently on a board and complained that it sanded extremely hard. I suggested he use Additive F in the Filler/Hot Coat. He did and later told me that it sanded better than Resin Research. I’m always telling people to use the Archives; So I took my own advice. Avoided a lengthy rehash for you all. Lowel
moved to last post
There was a long discussion about the ingredients of Additive F in this thread.
https://www.swaylocks.com/forums/xylene-additive-f-0
The main ingredient is xylene. Herb Spitzer claimed it is xylene with wax dissolved in it. Greg Loehr said it is not (secret sauce?)
The xylene had evaporated from an old bottle of Additive F I had lying around. I dug a small piece of the solids out before I tossed it. Looked and felt like wax. Quien sabe?