Hard to beat a Chinook box with milled fiber and woodies.
A curved box eh?
I’m surprised. Somebody put their thinking cap on to arrive at a universal tail rocker curve?
And Chinook is still (very likely) the strongest box out there because it isn’t a two part piece. Of course this is ancient history for those of us that lived sailboards in the 80’s.
To each their own… the bottom line is, as always: price, quality, ease of installation, cosmetics & availability (distribution).
Anything that screws up my “6 hr. formula” gets chucked to the side these days, I’ll let the rest of you become famous for the ‘masterpieces’ and reinvention of the wheel…
Absolutly! You can't just chuck a Chinook box and a couple of woodies into a board to be cute. I'm not saying I wouldn't do one on a shop board to get peoples attention, but I wouldn't do one for less than an additonal $100. The Futures box looks good, but you have to figure the set up costs (jig) and the extra time. My glasser puts a tail patch on mine already. Most boards don't have that, so that's a plus.
Chinook cost more than Bahne (Fins Unltd) boxes. I don’t know how they stack up against these new ones.
for multi fin setups, I use FCS Fusion versus others because they are light, strong, and easy to install. I hate the X2 plugs and quit using them 3 years ago. If Pro Box was as easy to install as Fusion, I would consider them, but they aren’t, and as much as I like Larry, I know he understands. He is one kine fin man.
Futures are good, I’m just set up to do what I do and do it well.
I don’t have time to reinvent the wheel or offer anything and everything to everybody. That’s a logistical nightmare and a lot of inventory to carry… sorry, not in this economy.
Exactly! Keep it lean and mean.
So today I ventured away from taping the open channel in a 10.5" bahne box. Using 4oz. cloth and UV resin. Guess what??? Went right through!!! the dang box was half full of resin. Lukily because I was doing a patch instead of the whole bottom lam, I had taped off the patch area like a cutlap. I flashed it in my booth to cut the patch, when I looked at the open channel I could see drips through the clear glass. I quickly cut out the slot and sure as hell it was half full of resin! I saved it by quickly stuffing the slot full of paper towels soaked in acetone. Had to repeat this process twice to get it all out. What went wrong???
haha, I caught the resin afew time be for glassing over the boxes with out tape, almost bought a few boards from my shaper that i worked for, that way.
When boxes or repairs to boxes where i have to get up close and personal with out cover tape, I will put wax on a q-tip and wax the shit out of the inside of the box. Saved my ass more than once that way. Any resin that gets in there pops right out.
Thanks Moonie, I'll remember that tip for sure!
Still wondering why the resin went right through? I thought the prevailing wisdom was that the cloth would keep it from going through on it's own??? I was careful not to push it through also. Maybe swiped over the slot twice! Also was thinking maybe the lack of MEKP catalyst allowed it to flow through. Anyway I think tape is definitely my friend for the next one!
You are mistakin my friend. The cloth is very pourous. In fact a good glass job not only pushes resin into, and through the cloth, you must squeege out the exsess resin. Any thing undernith the cloth surely gets wet with resin. The cloth is bonded to the foam, stringer and plastic parts of the finboxes and leash plugs.
The cloth is ackually so pourous, that even after lamination, your board is not waterproof. This is why there is a hotcoat. Even so some people take further precautions and add a gloss coat, or spary finish sealer.
The right way to do it, is tape the box opening and glass right over it. The MEK has nothing to do with it, I would add the least amount of MEK you add, which will increase your working time.
After that you are to sand the top of the box off, and re-tape for the hot coat. If its a center fin you have to cut the tape out with a razor blade. In my case i find it easyer using a dremal tool.
May I also recomend not getting the cheap hardware store brand masking tape, only use the blues painters tape, or the high end 3m masking tape commonly sold at surfboard building supplyers.
Thanks Moonie!
Check your inbox.
**I’m not sure what you guys are doing but I spent the entire 80’s capping cloth over 10" fin boxes and mast tracks on hundreds of sailboards without a problem. We would cap them, hotcoat, sand, gloss, polish, and the last thing we did was carefully rout the channels open and radius the glass lip along the box opening. No drips, no nightmares whatsoever. **
**Day in, and day out…and that was before UV resin even existed.
**
**Here’s a repair to a board that got smashed up this week, 4 oz. UV resin, no drips, not full of resin.
**
Thats crazy! Dead, if you hadn’t posted the pics I would have thought you were trying to get one over on the rookie. I swear that I did it just as I described. 4 oz cloth, UV resin. I was using a yellow bondo spreader which can really push resin through cloth. But just like I stated earlier I only made a couple of quick swipes over the slot. I did push it around the edge of the box to make sure it would get a good bond but no puddles. I wet it out front to back real quick, then pulled the excess off from the edge of the box to the rails.