I got another one of my stupid ideas of laminating an auction or maybe this roy-board with the entire contents of the Kumulipo or the ancient Hawaiian Chant of Origin or Beginning. In aboriginal cultures the passing of such oral history like this was key to its survival. Seems like something reproducable with this info that could be applied to things passed on as keep sakes be a noble task.
Problem is even printing the words and translation at 8point Arial font it comes out to 52 pages of printout on normal sized portrait oriented paper. If I split out the translation from the Hawaiian I could probably cut the number of pages in half to print larger and do one side of the board in Hawaiian and the other in English. It over 2000 lines of oral history
Now the way I see it there are three ways to try and get all this text onto the surface of a surfboard.
print it all out on rice paper sheet and tack them on to the surface before laminating
pro - fast simple under lam
con - too much rice paper weakening the lam bond to the board’s surface
print it on transparancy sheets as suggest by Speedy and some other and apply it to a wet out gloss or hotcoat and
peal off the seal with an acrylic spray or gloss.
pro - better bond
con - time consuming on the peel potential for lift offs.
hand print the text onto the board or hotcoat before lamming or glossing.
pro - better look better bond
con - lousy handwriting and it’ll take the rest of my life to hand scribe 52 pages of text on the board and make sure it all fits.
If I was a buddist monk, and had better handwriting I’d do option three as an extended meditative/learning project but I’m leaning towards option 1 or 2.
Any one experienced in doing an entire deck and bottom in rice paper under the lam with out getting delams?
If I had a plotter that I could print it out my graphics directly onto the fiberglass like some other folks do out there. That would be the best if the ink didn’t bleed because the text will be so small…
My original idea was to start in the middle and place the words so they extend out in a giant spiral to the edges except there’s just too many words in this story to do it that way…
Another idea is maybe perhaps do a series of boards as there’s 16 separate chants with a different graphic theme for that particular chant and sell the whole thing as some museum art piece like Drew Brophy(sp?) does…
on a side note
I do have a Canon large format(13"x19") injet photo printer. Is there a way to feed glass cloth through the inkjet as a 13" wide banner to glass on as an under layer?
Option 4. Print it directly on fiberglass. Maybe there was a recent thread from Kit in NZ? Send him a PM, I think it was him who figured it out.
Option 5. Go on the industry talk forum and find Marlee who prints the full-board graphics on “fleeces”. I think the thread is “Still searching for shapers” or something like that.
BTW - I think the idea is good. Figure it out, its eminently worthwhile. But get it under a layer or two of glass for the ding protection factor…
No expert on this matter so I don’t know if it’d work out, but you could try having it laser etched into the wood. This may even provide a better mechanical bond (again not sure on the process). I’ve seen some pretty detailed pictures done so small text is probably do-able.
Maybe you could even tint the board, the resin pooling in the text would make it bolder. Probably be a first of it’s kind.
Oneula: Last week I used another of the rice paper sheets you gave me at the Hau Bush Sway’s meeting. Worked well as usual; the graphic was emailed to me by the customer and I printed on my daughter’s printer.
I don’t think the rice paper artwork affects board strength at all, since the resin has so thoroughly saturated it as to give a continuous bond (not well stated but you get the idea).
So… my best shot is that if you have the text in a word processor format, print it on rice paper and, using UV resin, set the lam directly on the foam. I’ve had to put rice paper in the hot coat and you have to be very careful during sanding, not to grind right through it. Do-able, but not desirable.
Now, being in an engineering office I have access to a 42-inch wide inkjet printer… PM me if you want to pursue this approach using large sheets such as sold at Fiberglass Hawaii.
I am skeptical of being able to print directly on fiberglass. I mean it can probably be done with the correct equipment, but feeding it through most printers would be a nightmare. Double that if it jams! And the weave of most glass is so open that I’d think you would lose nearly half of what was printed.
Another item that may be significant. The other day I was stuck on the freeway behind a van with “In Loving Memory Of…” graphics across the back window. What happens to the message when the van (or surfboard) is crapped out and sent to the junkyard? Your posts show that you’re more spiritually aware than most of us… unless the board with Kumulipo is a wall hanger, it will age and…
You might want to consider sending Larry-Probox a PM as he has a connection in CA that does really amazing printing on something like 2oz. cloth, might be thinner, that can then be laminated onto the board.
I think you might have seen, or even ended up with, some ProBox fins from the Sway’s meeting on Oahu that were floral, well that floral print was done with this technique.
He has done some amazing artwork for some of the Bing boards.
Not sure what it costs to get this done but it sure would look amazing!
in particular maybe the solid wiliwili boards my brother’s trying to convince Kam school to let him do for the school.
Pohaku was supposed to build something for Iolani Palace with the logs we paid the tree trimmer to send him so maybe one of those enscribed with the chant would be an appropriate gift back of the wood taken.
I like Ben’s idea of seeing if Marlee can print them at Freaks of Fashion. Going through the trouble of getting the words into some sort of design it would make sense to be able to reproduce it.
Sounds stupid but I kind of fancy the idea of sticking it inside the board maybe on the glass layer under a wood skin like a hidden treasure to be found many years later.
Anyone have a suggestion on a graphics program that will let me take a long text string and us it ot fill in a graphic or to have the text take the form of a graphic?
I presume it needs to be a a program using vector/rastor objects like photoshop…
You could do what you want to do with Corel Draw or Illustrator (which is what I use!). I’ve attached a very rough sample.
You can draw any kind of continous line and make text follow it. You just need to make sure the text you are sampling has all the returns taken out so fit lows uninterrupted along the line.
You can also create a shape and put the text inside - could immortalise Roy’s face heh heh!
My brother has illustrator so it’s a matter of planning the design and the scale of the image to make it fit…
this Peter Schroff design had me captivated when he did it but I think the idea of having the words fill-in to create a graphic outline seems even more awesome…
