Dead Shaper, thanks for the help with trying to find foam here in Sydney. But I am afraid that Bondi contact wasn’t here. Anyway…
I AM STILL LOOKING FOR HOMEBLOWN EVERYONE! ANY HELP WILL BE MUCH APPRECIATED.
And as far as that performance output… has anybody given a high performance stick to a really good surfer? and what was the output?.. weight wise… how is it turning… liveliness…
Cheers boys!
I
You DON’T need epoxy on the BioFoam (Homeblown) blank.
Epoxy is widely acknowledged as stronger than polyester resins, but there are excellent polyester resins that have been around for many years.
MDI (BioFoam- Methyl Phenyl Di Isocynate)) is not as soft as Clark or U.S. Foam…both TDI (Toulene Di Isocynates)
Biofoam has a noticeably finer cell than the Clark or U.S…it is also noticeably harder, tears if you plane quickly and has a more sawing action when using a sanding block. The finish shaped blanks feel heavier than Clark or U.S., but can glass out lighter. This is due to less resin absorption into the blank.
The resin absorption on soft blanks can be countered by using UV activated polyester resin (or a hot batch of catalyzed resin) and presealing the blanks…you can use microballoons (Q Cell) in that presealing process. This was a regular practice for EPS blanks up until the recent introduction of super fused EPS. In fact you can also elect to use heavier cloths in the layup, then squeegee out very dry and come back with a Q cell hotcoat to fill air in the dry laminate. This is not cosmetic by any means but can yield a strong light board.
People place too much inmportance on the resin and not enough on the cloth. For the most part, resin is brittle and is not the structural reinforcement for the blank. In a sense, resin is like concrete which is another plastic (yes, really).
On a general consumer product I was working on, I was trying to drastically reduce the weight of a half pipe molded product with a hole in it (to hold dog bowls and potted plants up off the floor). The concrete was just too heavy for what I wanted and the hole made the unit want to crack easily. I sent my mold to a huge concrete company in Arizona that does shopping malls with concrete architectural features. My units were weighing in at 27 lbs. at the time.
They said they could only do what they could do and that concrete has to be certain thicknesses in order to have strength. I disagreed with them.
Then I told them to think about a highway overpass (bridge). Bridges have all that rebar in them to handle the weight of vehicles. “Well my form is like a bridge”. I told them to put long fibrous strands through the mold and to treat the concrete like window dressing, like icing on a cake - the concrete surface need only be smooth where visiblle to the eye (not the underside). They had special concrete that could cure in 5 minutes…they had a 180 lb. guy stand on the form about 10 minutes after pouring and releasing it from the mold and to their amzement, it held up fine!
They were blown away. I wasn’t surprised. Weight reduction 60%.