I’m going to document a few of my board building escapades, in enough detail to either bore you to tears or keep you engaged.
First off I love fantastic surfboards, kitesurfing and building things, I break EVERYTHING i own…and that is how this journey began.
This is my 4 year old board. It has been smashed on rocks, ridden into the ground. punted off waves and landed flat from 10 ft airs. …Sadly it started life with a flaw. while trying to speed up the bottom cure of the board using a 500W halogen lamp I cooked a section of the foam in the center of the board creating a small delamination on the bottom deck. after repeated hard landings the top deck was getting pounded into this bubble and eventually the top deck delaminated. with both decks delaminated the rail cracked and let in some water. open heart surgery was required.
the construction was
12 oz deck 0-90 45/45
1/8 d cell H80
6oz 45/45
0.75lb foam
60z 45/45
1/8 d cell H80
6 oz 0/90
it was 5’11 x 18 and weighed 2900 grams with probox fin boxes installed.
I loved this board…and I’m not done with it yet…to be continued…
(I wanted more detail in this post but spent alot of time trying to figure out how to link images)
Did I mention loved this board. It was faster than a bat out of hell. Every board I’ve ever ridden by comparison felt like it was dragging it’s ass in the water…It was fast,thin, flexible, strong, light and had survived being blown down the beach in 40 knots of wind with nothing but cosmetic damage.
Here she is in her prime…not good for super hot climates…but I don’t have that here.
Powered by PURE EVIL
I’ve done this repair type many times to other boards… it’s never pretty…it’s really hard to dry EPS. You can THINK you have it dry but open up that board and I guarantee you will still have foam DRIPPING with water…48 hours under 28inches of vacuum in a 50 degree hot box and it’s STILL sopping wet under the deck of a berger/tuflite type construction.
Here’s how I repair them, many ways to skin a cat this is likely the hardest and the most permanent way. love to hear your drying or repair techniques…
I’ve got another soaker coming my way soon. I’ll gladly try anything
Side bar* for anyone interested in how to fix a watersoaked cracked buggered tuflite here’s a previous repair…
find all the delaminated sections anywhere the deck flexes cut it out. I like using a dremel for this. and a respirator, the full face kind…this is the best tool I own…allows you to safely get your face inches from a dremel or router without fear losing an eye
pull out all that sopping wet foam…give it a squeeze…admit to your self it’s not dry…even though you though it was dry…it was never going to dry…
fill the hole with pour foam I used 2lb, the foam replaced in this one was .75lb. I like to seal it in to increase the density a bit and make sure it fills all the holes.
example only this is not the board I love…
Sand it fair with the board then set your router to 1/8" and cut in a nice indent for a piece of 1/8" corecell. install a layer of glass over the 2lb and vacuum bag on an oversized chunk of corecell into the indent. it will bend/crack under high vacuum to fit the hole perfectly sand it flat, glass over that and it’ll look like this…a big piece of shit.
You can’t polish a turd…but you can roll it in glitter…or in my case smooth it with microballoons and shoot it with tremclad. Then wetsand the shit out of it…at this point it’s no longer a turd and can be polished .
The guy i did this for was english…and happy…that was 3 years ago…last I saw him it was still running strong.
This was not my board. I have something better planned for that.
I’m using flicker… I use share then copy the embed code and paste it into the post …which seems to work now… but didn’t work in the past…the method I was using for embedding was far more complicated. This suddenly got easy.
So after gettiing into the repair mentioned above on my black board, it weighs a fair bit more… it feels noticeably heavy…I hate heavy boards, they fall off my feet in the air. The balance on this board used to be perfect. it just stuck to my feet in the air. The wind was all that was needed to keep it attached to my feet. It’s gunna be a turd…even if I try to shine the shit out it.
I could put in straps but straps piss me off, I like to move my feet around when riding and they are always in the way. I’ll be in 2 feet of foam and switch stance to get out of the froth faster. I’d be tripping all over myself doing this in straps.
I had a few tubes of 50lb 1"x 1/8" rare earth magnets kicking around for some other abandoned handy man project. These things are so powerful they are just fascinating… Takes all my thumb strength just to pull them apart. They seemingly attract each other from yards away and then meet in a glorious magnet splintering SMASH when mishandled. They’ll stick to each other through your hands. It feels like it’s trying to suck my soul out of my hand…PERFECT!
my board weighs like 6 lbs, the magnet will hold 50…this has gotta work…there’s no way this isn’t going to work…
Magnets are tricky buggers they are only strong when they are really close, So looked at a few options.
Steel mesh on board magnets on feet… FAIL couldn’t get it to pull hard enough to pick up the board
steel sheet metal on board magnets on feet. FAIL. sheet metal was really heavy and magnetic force wasn’t very high.
Magnets on board and magnets in feet seems to be enough to do the job
as a trial… taping magnets to the board I can pick the board using 6 magnets through an insole
Alright back on track…All i need is magnetic shoes…I’m a board builder, not a shoemaker…but sewn many kites, molded lots of fins, sewn up kite lines and harnesses and have tons of nasty chemicals around…I can do this…This is totally gunna work
Now you people watching are probably wondering why I don’t use velcro…cuz it’s too easy and would be no damn fun at all…that’s why.
Actually velcro sucks and wears quickly… Also works like crap when it’s really dirty…
After playing with magnets I realized the first challenge is not breaking them. they are very brittle. Even when just pulling one magnet to another they impact with enough speed to shatter. I need to make sure they are well contained I can’t just glue them to the bottom of a set of shoes. So shoe making it is…
It’s also really important to have the magnets as close to the other ones as possible. Distance is the enemy.
So to contain them I needed something strong thin and abrasion resistant for the bottom surface …I used spectra, the strongest material on earth and wet it out with urethan rubber…overkill yes…but so is this entire project…
I took the urethane spectra insole and placed it on top of a piece of poly mounted on steel. I placed the magnets onto the poly. The steel is there so the magnets don’t fly off and smash into each other and they stay in place.
then I made a clay dam along the outside of the insole and filled it with polurethane rubber. until the magnets were covered.
3 magnets worked…so I went with 5…hoping it will be the difference between board staying on my feet and a strapless grabless 360
Next challenge was to put magnets into the board. I found I used about 2-3 foot positions when riding the board plus switching stance
that means about 6 foot positions… Using the following array of magnets, I was able to maximize the number of foot positions with all 5 magnets engaged while minimizing the number of magnets. Had I started this again I would’ve used a square evenly spaced magnet layout in the insoles and further minimize what went into the board. I made a template out of foam of where I placed the magnets when making the insoles. So that the magnet lay out on the board would match the insoles perfectly
Magnets were embedded into 2 layers of glass and then covered over with a single layer of fiberglass. North South polarity had to be strictly observed in both building the shoes and the deck…
I did the rear deck a little smarter since it wasn’t already cut open it seemed stupid to cut it. I drilled through a chunk of corecell. embedded the magnet in urethane glued it to the deck and glassed over it…turn out I didn’t need to wait for my board to die before trying this project
interesting! So youre just glassing the magnet embedded foam over the deck? Is there a possibility of the magnets repelling if you switch stance? Why not magnets one surface, steel the other?
From the test trials, I was struggling to get the required holding force with steel on one surface and magnets on the other. My requirement was to not add a ton of weight to the board…I wanted to see if I could keep the added metal about the same as a foam deck pad. I could only do this with individual magnet placement.
As to the polarity all the magnets on the board had to be oriented with one pole outwards and all magnets on the shoes oreinted with the other pole outwards …All on the deck North and all on the shoes south so regardless of stance they attract.
In honesty I screwed one up and had to dig it out of the board.
I also looked at electromagnets but there was not one that I could find with reasonable weight/strength and current draw. The rare earth magnets were infinitely better.
