"Oh Sh*t!" Post your most memorable mess-ups!

General Discussion
1

Let’s face it, screwing up is part of the process of building surfboards–at least for me it is…

I ask you all to put your reputations on the line for the amusement of others and post pictures or stories of your most memorable mess-ups, anything from dropped blanks to runaway routers to misjudged resin ratios and everything in between.

Perhaps I just want to feel better about this:

[img_assist|nid=1056929|title=measurement mishap|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=480|height=640]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[img_assist|nid=1056930|title=mishap 2|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=480|height=640]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have fun!

2

rule number 1. no photos. admit nothing.

I might know a guy who’s blown out a couple fin boxes because the jigs weren’t secure…who left his epoxy in the cup too long and when ti started to smoke thought it would be a good idea to just dump it all out on the board…who knocked his finished board off the racks while polishing, putting a nice ding right in the rail…who forgot that you needed peel ply/release film between your breather and all surfaces of your wet laminate…WHO THOUGHT THAT BUILDING HIS OWN BOARDS WOULD BE CHEAPER THAN JUST BUYING A NEW ONE.

3

Hey rising tide,you can probably get away with that install.Set the box in the hole and mark it from the deckside to see how much you need to grind off,doesn’t look like too much.Grind it off then place a piece off good masking tape over the hole on the deck.Line the hole with a few layers of 4oz glass,then install the plug.After the resin and plug are in the hole check the tape again,if its not flat put another piece over it to flatten it out and let the resin set up.I’ve got a few boards with thin tails and quad setups,so I’ve made this fukup a few times over.Good luck.

4

I dunno if its the same guy, probably not, but I knew a clever fellow who put his leash cup in, then flipped the board and routed for his fin box, taking the bottom right off the leash cup in the process.  Then he got smart and epoxied the top of the fin box where it met the leash cup (with no bottom), and thought that would seal it - and never tested.  On a board with a wide, chambered stringer.  That sucked in water to the hollow stringer.   So then he fixed it. 

And so next time it took in water was from the cracks around the fin box, because he didn't leave enough meat when he hollowed out the stringer.  This was on the board that he glassed twice on the deck after the lam de-lammed because he forgot the air in the chambered stringer would expand when set in 100 degree sun to cure the resin. 

On the deck with the extra layer of glass on a deck patch - which he very cleverly routed down a bit, but accidentally went a bit too much, so he ended up with more layers of glass, and finally, bondo, to bring it back up flush with the rest of the board. 

Just a real fluster cluck of a board!

Admit nothing!

5

Ha afoaf! I think I know that guy too!

 

Thanks for the tips Jesus–it was actually just a mis-measurement on my part. I measured like 5/8" instead of 1 1/4" so I’m going to figure out a way to set the box in the right place. That’s going to be a whole 'nother adventure…

6

Haha!! Maybe I should’ve titled the thread “Post your FRIEND’S most memorable mess-ups!”

7

Just finished my 3rd board this weekend, first 2 were epoxy, after the last coat on the second board I developed an allergic reaction to the stuff, my face swelled up bad, stayed that way for 2 weeks so no more epoxy for me.

So anyway, the guy at Fiberglass Hawaii suggested I use Solarez. Great stuff, made it real easy. Except when installing FCS plugs, must use catalyst (Obviously). No problem, I thought.  Iv’e mixed resin before using catalyst, usually just eyeballing. Well anyway, after spending an exorbitant amount of time getting the fin placement just right (thanks to all you guys) I set the plugs around 8PM Saturday night. At 2:30AM I woke up and thought, I wonder if I put in enough catalyst? So I went down to my garage and crap if I hadn’t used enough. They were still all loose, so I pulled the jigs out with the plugs.  Then I had to get all the resin out of the holes. I had used cut up fiberglass to help strengthen it. What a mess it was. I thought it was curtains for this board. I went back to bed and then got up and went surfing the next morning at dawn. 

It all turned out OK as I happened to see a local shaper in the water. He gave me some tips on getting it cleaned up and reinstalling the plugs. I made little test batches to get my catalyst down. It actually came out pretty good. The board is for my son by the way, way too small for me.

The moral of the story for me is that as fun as it is to read about other peoples mistakes, you really learn from making your own. 

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8

So far only major screwups involved rabid routers.

First mishap was when I did not lock down the router while routing out probox’s. The bit was a bit shallow and grabbed the jig and took an abrupt 90º turn and proceeded to chart its own course through the jig.

Second was while trying to rout out a cracked fin box. The bit caught the fin box material and caused the router to jump straight up and in my attempt to hang on to it, it came down outside the box and through the rail.

Amazing the amount of distruction a router can do in a milisecond! I have since learned to be VERY cautious with a router.

9

I’ve done the fin box routing and noticed the light shining through the whole I made because the foam was like 2mm thick…ops.

I’ve been drilling FCS holes and had the bit just spin off leaving some not so nice marks and damage.

But
may favorite is the Future fin jig. For some reason I can never
remember that the little plastic insert you use to set the jig on your
marks has a front and a back! I’ve had a few “Oh shit” moments with that
thing.

Oh one more, for a long time I could not get away from fingerprints and
hand marks in my glass jobs. I could never figure it out because I was
always using disposable gloves. Then I one day realized I was using
gloves with powder on them…powder covered gloves BAD!

10

Ah, Router Wars.  Been there, done that.  Got the T-shirt.  

I learned about the importance of using decent tape to lay a lap line the hard way.  It was the same lesson wherein I learned the importance of blowing your blank off before taping and using something to press the entirety of the tape flat against the blank.  

I learned that when mixing dark colors in with an abstract resin tint that a tiny bit goes a long way and a couple ounces will give you a great big dark blob.   I learned that when using small amounts of pigmented resin on an otherwise clear board that you need at least 2 or 3 clean spreaders.

I learned that trying to mix small quantities of epoxy using using small measuring cups leads to a lot of waste as well as inconsistent results.  $20 digital kichen scale mo’ bettah.  

I learned that 1.5# EPS foam can indeed get heated up enough to blow holes through a veneered glass job if you try to heat cure such a board by laying it out in the summer sun using a black plastic trash bag as a heat sink.   

I learned that Future fins can be modded so they can be installed in a box that has the screw facing the tail instead of the nose.  

I learned that surfboards with really bad mistakes sometimes still surf really well.  

11

Ha! Gdaddy, I like the one about the Futures mod… very clever way around a very annoying problem.

12

I’ve caught a 3/8" thick cedar stringer damn near on fire while routing longboard finbox,I thought I’d just route straight down the stringer first and get it out of the way…wrong.Instead the stringer started smoldering and little hot coals started melting through the eps foam.I nicknamed this technique"finbox install pre-exotherm".haha.Now I zigzag the stringer when routing and also stop to check the bit for heat,the bit will melt foam if it gets to hot.

13

the melting finbox with epoxy was my biggest oh shit

14

    O! where to begin? Here’s a memorable one…After shaping and glassing six boards for myself and friends, a friend had a friend who needed a shaped blank glassed. Up until then, I had had no problems with glassing, no major problems at least, so I said yeah, sure. The friend of mine also had some glass he said I could have, because he couldn’t use it for what he was doing, and I might as well use it for this project. OK, I said, Sounds good. So I took the glass, and poured on my lam resin, only to discover that this glass would NOT wet out, no matter how hard I tried. I mean, it did to an extent, but not like other 6 and 4 oz. glass I had used. So I ended up with air bubbles, some big ones. Deck lam, I slowed the catalyst time down, and still couldn’t get it to wet out all the way with no bubbles. More bubbles. I’ve dealt with some air bubbles before, just cut them out, patch them, the hotcoat makes them disappear, right? Not with this glass. The weave of the cloth showed visibly through the hotcoat, as well as all the little, and some big, patches I had put in. The first glass job I had ever done for a stranger was the first one that was going totally wrong. So after sanding down the hotcoat, getting lots of sand-throughs because the lam had gottne screwed up, then having to do another hotcoat, the board was finally finished, and it came out perfectly functional, but not the greatest looking. I felt terrible. I gave the guy a set of fins for the board, and offered all of his money back. He was a good sport and wouldn’t take it. I ended up giving him some back anyway.

     Moral: Don’t use fiberglass that you’re not familiar with to glass an entire board, especially a stranger’s.

 P.S. The glass I used felt like 6 oz., but, like I said, the weave showed through the hotcoat very clearly, as well as the patches, and when I sanded the lam the fibers fuzzed up instead of going smooth, and it soaked up a lot more resin than normal glass. Does anyone have a clue what kind of glass this was?

    I find I’ve learned a lot about ding repair through building boards, because some the fixes I have to do end up being just that, but on a board that has no excuse being dinged in the first place.

 

Chris

15

What problem???

16

Chippies Bushfire Fish was a beauty, rails went off before we could glass them under, masking tape stuck in the resin, nose totally FU.

This ended up being one of the the most versatile boards I've ever seen....

 

 

17

Rising Tide, sounds like your friend had Innegra cloth. It's a polypropylene plastic, so it fuzzes when sanded and doesn't go completely clear. Should be strong, however.

My "bull in a glass shop" moment I've told here before. When I had just got my driver's license and was wanting a new stick so I headed over to a startup surfboard factory in town. There was no one in the showroom, but there was this really cool looking round pin with a mint green deck and green bottom, with this pale blue pinline on it that was screaming at me to run my finger along it. One problem, pinline hadn't kicked yet! Left a two or three inch smudge that they could have easily identified me with the fingerprint at the end. I looked around, no one was there, so I split and came back a few days later. Didn't get my ass kicked, so I guess I pulled that one off!

I was glassing for a friend of mine about 20 years ago, and he had just shaped a new design for himself that I figured I'd like to ride. I rushed him to finish up and ran it into the glassing room. Everything was going fine, but as I got ready to tuck the laps, GLOP! The board slid off the glassing stand and onto the tar paper covered floor. Should have blown the dust off! The caved in rail was pretty bad, but the black shit and other goodies that came  up with the glass and resin was just beautiful. Needless to say, said shaper wasn't very stoked! Funny thing was, he told another buddy of mine that we were making a board for that it was his board, not the shaper's, that hit the floor. Typical surfer, anything to buy him a little more time to put off the job at hand!

18

two words: resin drips

 

along one whole side of a 12’ paddleboard…

[img_assist|nid=1051224|title=drips|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=640|height=480]

19

 

I could be wrong but it sounded to me like he put the box in backwards, and instead of routing it out and doing it over, he just modded the fin to be put in the wrong-facing box. That’s one way to do it!

20

Deck lam on an EPS board in RISING temps…  And I forgot to put holes in the bottom lam…

 

I got a bubble about 6 inches in diameter and about 2 inches off the board!

 

I took a razor blade and sliced it open and then folded it down.  Fortunately, the epoxy was still gummy.  So messy, but it worked out. 

Anyway - after much sanding to get it flat, it looks OK - I think you need to know it is there to actually see it and the wax goes over it anyway. :wink: