Hello
Is it needed to laminate over the leash plug or can i just drill the hole and put in
the plug with some resin and cut glass? I won’t use the board in very big waves.
Do you have some tips?
Thanks a lot
JD
Speijk Boards
I dont think anyone glasses over the leash cup
if its in the stringer its definetly solid
Speijk
If you like the extra work… it adds a little bit of solidity to the whole plug concept. No more water intrusion for sure. But better suited to Stringerless, HD -less boards.
But like Ken said, it you use stringers, the stringer will hold the cup just fine.
Wouter
If you glass over it, fill the leash cup with surf wax, leave the “rim” clean, then glass over it…
After the resin hardens, sand away the glass over the wax…
Works great…
Paul,
you do this with epoxy? Does the wax not prevent the epoxy from hardening?
Yeah, epoxy…
The epoxy hardens but it doesn’t stick…
Use an o’fish’l leash cup with a cap. it is a pre glassing installation and you glass over it with a patch and your regluar glass schedule on your board. then grind off the cap/cover when sanding your board. There are other similar products available that do the same thing. It can actually save some time when making many boards and you will possibly never have one come out. I have personally never seen one get ripped out. In the world of stringered, stringerless and composite boards the pre glass cup is the way to go. If your board is already glassed and finished and you will be in small surf use a stick on deal, there are many to choose from.
Thanks for all the answers!
My board is a stringerless xps-epoxy fish (6,3).
My glassing is already finished, I think it’s easier to drill a hole and put the plug in.
I’ll use epoxy resin with the FCS glass bubbles, i’ll aso add some cut glass pieces.
I hope this will be strong enough.
If you really advise something else i hope tou wanna tell me.
Thanks
JD
That will be plenty strong.
There is an easier way. You can laminate over a leash plug or fin box without making a mess of it by saturating the cloth on a piece of card board and then carefully picking it up and lay it over the plug or fin box. If you take care the resin will not run down into the plug or box. After it has gone off you can with care start with the fill coat or coats. I put fine boxes under the glass this way. Put the box in the shaped blank, trim it down with the router, glass over it with light weight cloth, sand the rough edges and then laminate the board. After the glassing is done use a formica trimming bit in the router to open up the box.
Here’s one better…goes for fin boxes and plugs (if you really want to bother with glass over plug.
4 Ounce cloth as a tight enough weave that you can laminate it over an open fin channel and it will not fill the channel. If you do it right, it won’t even drip in the channel. I did this on all my surfboards and sailboards throughout the 80’s while also capping the woodies we put around fin boxes on sailboards.
Just sand the surrounding area with 60 or 80 or 100 grit. Brush some lam. resin around the area careful not too thick so any runs into the open channel. Lay one or two layers of 4 oz. over the area and squeegee some resin to wet out cloth and to get flat. Hotcoat as usual afterward. You can then sand the entire board and gloss and polish if desired. Take a router, Dremel, or laminate trimmer (aka Plam router) and careful trim the channel clear. File or sand the cut edge slightly rounded to the channel so a tight fin doesn’t pull the cloth up off the box. It works best if you sand the fin box before installing including the face that the glass has to stick to. Use coarse sandpaper for this like 50 grit. The resin and glass will not chemically bond to the box…the coarse sandpaper will provide some ‘tooth’ to effect a ‘physical’ bond.
I played with and developed this approach around ‘81 or 82’ as we were still learning how to get air on our waveboards (sailbds) at Jalama and frequently blew boxes out by landing wrong. We needed to fortify the boxes and the wood laterals had to be sealed. We kept this as a trade secret for quite awhile when people saw them and asked how we did it. People suggested we were filling the fin channels with water before glassing over or putting foam or wood inserts in the channel then routing those out.
We just smiled and said “good guess”.
Hi Paul I doe the same, but I use blue tac (putty for sticking stuff to the wall) then just cut the class with a knife, even once its cured is it’s still really easy to cut through with a craft knife.
Hey Dead:
I do basically the same thing except I put in my plugs and boxes after I hot coat. I cap the pugs and boxes with two layers of 4 or 6 oz glass. I clear the channel after I gloss and polish. I learned this from Charlie Wong who ran the Naish sail board factory in Kailua. I never had a box or leash plug pulled out. I like to do this because there is no gaps between the glass and the plug.
It works!
D
Yes, neat trick. Actually I think you got the idea I was doing it in the shaped blank (which of course you can) but I also did this after the boardswere hot coated and then routed. We did a fair amount of stuff like adding mitred fiberglass or wood nose and tailblocks this way as it is so much easier to use the grinder to rough out the addition having the protection of a glassed and hotcoated board. Then we just whipped on the laminates and hocoats and sanded everything out ready for gloss and polish. And there wasn’t really any sense in opening the channel early and getting a bunch of sanding crap and polishing goo down in the box, so opening the channel was the last step we performed.
Naish, Bruce Jones, Dill and some of the other quality guys picked up on this around the same time we did…it was kind of nice to be in that quality of company.