Nose Laps Won't Set Right

Do I need to cut them vertically every 3-4 inches? They just won’t set flat - I get bunches every 3-4 inches.

BB

Depends on the outline of the nose template.

Pointy, straight railed shorties need only one cut, and one removal cut.

Round nosed funboards, really wide, like 17" a foot back, might need 5 cuts total.

The # of cuts depend on your experience and exactly the radius of the given board’s nose.

Same with tails and wings, especially E wings!

Funny, Carper’s Glassing 101 only mentions 2 cuts - front and back. I had to strip (blade) from the nose back about 2 feet. I’ll just have to get creative when coating the top deck ( so it meets precisely). That’s what I hate about surfboard DVDs and videos - if you have a question, it can’t be answered!

BB

Kinda hard for a 45 minute video to cover 120 boards worth of glassing experience.

Glass has a lot of stretch when its wetted out, are you using a bondo type spreader when you turn your rails or a rubber squeegee, Bondo spreader works better for this job. Also if you work from the middle out to the nose or tail you won’t have as much cloth bunching at the ends. Just like Mr DD. said it depends on the curve of the nose, but you should really only need to cut the cloth at the very tip and tail. Make sure you work the glass straight down, sometimes when you get going to fast theres a tendency to pull the cloth in the direction you are working/moving, and when you get to the nose or tail you have already bunched a pile of weave and there’s no place for it to go. Try to have the weave as expanded as possible before you get to tight turns. If you start doing relief cuts, and you are doing a tint job, you will get darker / lighter blotches on your rails ever place you have an overlap. Not good.

-Jay

I just glassed the bottome of a fish - wide nose. Should’ve made some relief cuts but didn’t. UV resin allowed me to do some quick surgery before it set in but I’ll still have to work some magic during the deck glassing. I even have to re-airbrush where some of the laps lifted - color came up with them. I worse comes to worse, I’ll pen or pigment a lap border all the way around. Good news - the bottom look fine! It’s just the nose rails that sucked.

BB

Keep in mind that when you are wrapping the rail glass, you are trying to put the same amount of material into an ever-decreasing area. This is possible because of the space between the fibers in the weave of the cloth. As you push it up under, the fibers slide over each other and weave closes up. But, as you can see, there is a limit as to how far you can go. Once the fibers are next to each other and there is no more space, the glass has nowhere to go and starts bunching up. Maybe you are just trying to make the lap too wide. Back when noseriders like the “Ugly” were popular, using a lap of only an inch and a half or so, you could actually wrap the rail all the way around the nose without even a cut at the stringer. But they were almost semi-circular and we were using 8 oz. glass which has a lot more space than the 6 or the 4. Since we used Volan glass, multiple cuts were not an option for us but if your glass is clear, they certainly would be a big help. As mentioned, squeegee direction is important too. It should be at a right angle to the tangent of the curve at that point (in other words, as resinhead said, straight in). And don’t necessarily push it all the way under on the first pass. By going just part way, you give the glass a chance to adjust a little at a time, though you do need to push it far enough so that it doesn’t fall back down.

Hope this helps,Gene

Howzit Boondockbill, I only do 1 relief cut at the nose and depending on what kind of tail either 1 cut for rounded pin or 2 for a square tail or 3 for a diamond tail. The answer is in the way you wrap and squegee those areas. I don’t think you can learn how from a video and you just need to spend a little time with a expierenced glasser. You’ll be amazed how much there is to learn about glassing techniques. Aloha, Kokua