Hello,
Does anyone have any experience using polyurethane insulation sheets? I have read the Home Depot board threads but they use EPS. There are some 2" PU sheets laying around my construction site and I thought that I might try to make a Steve Pirsch style 8 footer (wide and thick) but don’t know if the material is tough enough.
Thanks for any input
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
While I have’nt used flat sheets of PU for a board, I have with EPS…
I cannot imagine why you could’nt do it.
I had a shaper friend who migrated to Aus. from the British Channel Islands, where, he said, the boards he first made were all from flat sheets of PU before Clark started supplying there.
I’ve seen the PU blocks blown and sliced for railroad carriage insulation in the factory belonging to an early business partner of Don Burford…its fascinating:- Big hydraulic adjustable concrete boxes into which the mix is poured, 4 x 4 x 8ft blocks sliced on a wire saw.
I think either a ply of thinner slices glued into a curve, or multiple stringers would hold a curve in pieces of flat PU.
Anyway, have a go!
Josh
Howzit 70Spit, The thing to check is the density of the foam sheets. If they are to soft you are wasting your time but if they have a high density then go for it. Clark used to sell high density sheets which worked great for replacing delamed decks or decks that were really badly dented. Seems to me he stopped selling them in the late 80's or early 90's. We used to have a sailboard builder on Kauai that would rout the decks and put the high density sheets in his shapes before glassing and they held up really good. Aloha,Kokua