Surftech

General Discussion
21

going on three seasons with a poly HPLB ridden a bunch in well overhead punchy beachbreak, glassed 6, 4/6 all S cloth, 3" at center.  Fairly light, not a stress line to be seen.

Chatted with a board builder at the beach yesterday who  builds only epoxy, double 6 top and bottom, and runs carbon fiber overlay strips nose to tail on top and bottom of his personal longboards, has yet to snap a board with that combo.

Have seen a lot more broken Surftech longboards over the years then custom made lb’s.  Rigid shells ( the problem?) seemingly weak guts.

Stick with a custom, talk to your shaper about how to trick out the glassing to make it stronger while keeping it light enough.  If he contracts out his glass, talk to them about it.

22

I repair some surftech, latest tuflite tech is just timberflex: a thin sheet of wood (0.6mm) between fiberglass over light eps. Those boards are flexible, especially longboards, and they buckle easily. Old PVC tuflite was stronger and stiffer but they used such light fiberglass badly laminated that 5 boards i repaired seemed to have broken by tension on impact!

Rigid PVC sandwich shells isn’t the problem for me, if they’re well done, with good fiberglass well laminated, they are really strong, but stiff. Surftech’s problem, and in general cobra’s production problem, is bad overall quality. The same problem for production windsurf / custom windsurf boards.