when most skin the deck of the blank do you keep your planer on the max depth? or take a number of passes?
Try one cut, and you will know.
Set deep, but not too deep to thin out your board too much.
set as shallow as you can and still cut through the outer skin
note: if using a Clark blank you want to minimize how much you take off the deck as the highest density foam is near the surface.
Thats my next step Tim. Keep up the good work with the questions. Your asking things that i’ll be asking soon .
why do you need to skin it anyway? easier shaping?
When glassing, it’s really noticeable, expecially coloring the board. HI dense foam absorbs less resin.
Also, it’s hard to make a smooth transition between hard and soft foam when you are fine shaping the deck contours.
clark foam style blanks come with a higher density crusty layer which is skinned off. This is just removing the crust (1/16-1/8th). This process is called skiing the blank.
Once you remove the crust you want to minimize how much foam you remove from the deck as the out foam is denser than the foam nearer the center. The more you remove, the softer the deck will be and more likely to get heel dents and eventually delam. So remove the crust then foil your deck removing as little foam as you can. Remove foam from the bottom to adjust thickness as a soft bottom is not as bad as a soft deck. (sorry if you knew all this already).
leeDD kinda explained why, which was what I was more aiming for, but thanks anyway.