i make a phone call to kensurf in the late afternoon about a week ago.
i ask him what's up my man?
he then tells me of a gloss job on the bottom and rails of a repaired board .
the board in question belongs to a very good friend of ours,"fat freddy".
i'm in my shop looking directly at my thermometer.............it says ,"60 degrees f.
i'm thinkin' a sh*t load of catalyst for this ............right.
he's using like 20cc per qt....................uhuh............more like 30 or 35 would get you the desired time + it's a rapidly falling temp.
ken says he's going back to the shop to check it out................it's been like 20 min.s or so since he put the gloss coat down.
he finds that it's still wet but slowly gelling,and says i gotta hang up ,i'm going to go over it again with the brush, because it's separating at the nose.(he was using a 3" chip brush at that).i told him don't touch it! you can clean up the problems later,nooooooooooo.........did he listen...........
a few mintues later he calls me back and says i can come over and have a good laugh on him.
when i got there he was very bummed.................i told him it wasn't that bad................nothing a sander can't solve.
moral of the story, "listen,and one might receive".
post your follies here...............we hear about the good................but what we really want to here about is the bad and the ugly !
Just finished my first board so I thought I would post some of my f#ck ups.
Tried a resin swirl straight out and it actually went ok because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I ended up mixing all my colors like everyone advised and I ended up adding 0.5ml catalyst to 8oz of resin for each color. I didn't realize that the temp in my shop had increased significantly since the last time I checked and its was now hovering around 95 degress or so. I poured my colors and it kicked SUPER fast, which was actually good because the colors didn't mud as much. My mix cups melted in my hands as I was pouring the colors. It actually worked out OK. I read some of the resin swirl threads and I realized that a fast kick and quick swirl was a good thing.
HERB I also realized the hard way your should NEVER touch your hotcoat after it kicks. NEVER.
Holy Crap..where to begin! Ok the one that physically hurt the most...and please note as a newbie at 35 boards the number of stupid things I have done is stunning ok!!!
Last summer I decided to get in UV resin. Revamped my shed to glass my first UV job, part of my brilliance was to painstakingly erect a blue tarp lean-to over the doors of my shed. The purpose being to block the UV rays from getting in the shed and ruining my efforts. It looked really cool! I also set up a glassing rack in the yard close by said lean-to.
Well everything went just stellar! I glassed that puppy up and everything was seriously lookin gooooooooodddd!
Well that was until I excitedly exited my shed....deftly navigating the ramp that used to allow my riding lawn mower storage....ducking under the lowered edge of my brilliantly erected blue tarp lean-to...balancing my prized UV glassed board like a chinese gymnast....heading in a perfect trajectory toward my most excellent glassing stand....and then...
I tripped....over the expertly engineered....rope...that held my lean-to...from blowing away....and with cat like reflexes....realizing I was about to drop my prize...I turned...to recover...went down on one knee....almost saved it...then the next knee....no...no...didn't hit the ground...couldn't hit the ground becasue my shin.... was impaled.... in-fact.... on my expertly placed 18" rebar stake used to hold the rope.....launched the board...ruined...bled some...got stiches...
Built my most excellently engineered UV curing booth....ordered another blank...
Last board i glassed i decided not to wear shoes, good old thongs will be fine. So they stick to the plastic, but im glassing so a i can't stop to fix them up, and i end up walking like a cat on the grass trying to unstick my feet as im walking around the board doing the lam. Was laughing to myself at my stupidity. Lam was fine, but the bottom of my feet were sticky for days!!
Oh yeah, on one of my first boards i put almost a litre ( quart ) of resin on the floor in a container. I turned around and guess what? Yep, i knocked it over. It was uncatalysed, so i just poured a heap of catalyst on the puddle, and tried to contain it while it kicked. I eventually had to chisel it off the floor. PE resin sticks to concrete brillianty. Shatters really well when you chisel it off!!
Then there's the story of my "pacman" board. 6'1'' fish, but while planing, i dug somewere and flicked the board off the racks, and lost some of a swallow. So its now a 5'8'' round tail with a baby swallow.
I lammed the deck and it went great. In fact, I called my buddy while I was waiting – “OH man, just lammed a board and everything went perfec…SHIT!”
The thing I forgot to do was to put a hole where the fin boxes go to stabalize the air pressure inside the board and I had a huge air bubble on the deck! – it was fixable - sliced it with a razor blade and stuck it back down - then drilled some holes in the bottom…
There is wax on the board where the issue occured so you can’t really see it…
Howzit Herb, He should have listened to you,a lot times the separations will flow back together and if they don't as soon as they stable you can fill the seps with resin and since the resins are still damp they meld together usually in about 15 mins after it kicks,easy fix. You do enough and you will get some problems just because it happens.Aloha,Kokua
ha, this is just cracking me up, the worst mistake I made was when I was preping my little garden shed to lam a board, I blocked out all the uv light, got my resin ready, laid out the glass then called my missus to close the shed door, she did just that, but the trouble was I forgot to get a light ready. The shed was pitch black. My missus had gone out for the afternoon and I was stuck in a black shed, with no light, and a bucket of uv resin and a blank with glass somewhere in there. I could see the blank a little so thought, well Im stuck here, may as well try to lam it in the dark as i had all afternoon to burn
.As you could imagine it didnt come out to good, better than I thought but I wont be giving that board a filler coat, lol.
Howzit Herb, He should have listened to you,a lot times the separations will flow back together and if they don't as soon as they stable you can fill the seps with resin and since the resins are still damp they meld together usually in about 15 mins after it kicks,easy fix. You do enough and you will get some problems just because it happens.Aloha,Kokua
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ya ya ya I should have listened to Herb!
in fact I should have payed attention to the signs ,,, like no 4'brush and previouse cold nights
Cool thread can i join>?
3 rd board ever built whent like this.
I used the pre canted Fusion plug thing, I installed it didnt even check and set the angles straight. Glassed it, didnt filler coat and whent straight for the thick hot coat thinkng this was easier, sanded it for like fricken hours, sand burnt through a layer of glass into foam so reglass a patch and sanded more. Forgot to install the leash plug so just got a thread of left over glass and made a quick loop.
Took the board for a surf 3 hours later cause the surf was so inviting, got the fins out slot the fins in and WHAT THE F., Yeah the fins where like standing inwards minus 9° cant。。。Yeah must of installed the Plug front side back.!
Howzit I think that is one flub you'll never do again my friend. I have to admit I do mess with my gloss jobs sometimes but I also know what I can pull off and when the time has come to leave it alone. Were you able to fix it since it is not that hard to fix. If you do enough of them you'll figure out how to fix your mistakes just like every other step in building a board. But I am sure Herb got a laugh and I know I did , but we were laughing with you I hope. Now don't you want to jump into the shop and gloss a couple of boards and get it out of your system. Aloha,Kokua