Has anyone made a channel bottom board with timber veneer? How did you do it? Photos?
you should PM Speedneedle (Josh)
not sure if he will pony up his tricks in public
I think timber veneer is a dirty word for speedneddle. I recall him saying he uses “planks” and" sawn cut" timber for his wood builds. I think his boards look way better than any timber veneer ever posted here. And for that matter, better than all other boards also. Hope to order and own one someday.
If only a channel or so, then you need to razor cut the veneer to bend in at the apex and valley of the channel. if you have multiple channels then the total surface area of the bottom of the board will be more area than the amount of veneer you have allocated. Meaning you will have to inlay wedge veneer to the bottom veneer, or you will have huge vee wood gaps. It might be cool to use a different colored wood in the channels?
Also a way might be to first vac bag the chanels with wood wedge shapes, then come over the top with the veneer. Once done you could razor blade and sand the whole thing pretty?
To me it all sounds like a pain in the ass, and a vac bag nightmare. Heffe, you always pick the most difficult builds possible..........and that's why I love you.
You are going to need a full pull of 20+mmhg's to make those curves bubble/delam free. So I would recommend a rocker table, and regular CE resin. CE resin because you will be fussing, taping, and cussing the thing in and out of the bag.....you'll need the extra time.
Good luck and photo's.
Thanks Jay. Still debating the doability…
My plan was to cut the channels, put wood on the side and then bag the veneer with vees cut, like you mentioned, but it seems, like you said, a pain in the ass.
I was hoping Speedneedle would chime in. If I remember, early on he did some channel bottom with timber and corecell on the sides of the channels. It must have been a pain in the ass because lately all his channel bottoms have a complete core cell inlay, no wood anywhere near the channels…
Hi Jeff -
I would have chimed in sooner, except the page has timed out every time I tried to submit a response.
I think it was Schwuz who built up channels using strips of timber then shaped. And Kayu mentioned attempting to bag balsa into channels. Either way, those looked like very big pains-in-the-ass to me. Experience says if there’s a big red X through your idea after some thought, then take it another direction.
I’m happy with the insert section of foam method I’ve posted pics of. Most recently this one -
JD
Hi, just started this board and found this thread on Sways.
Styrofoam blank/core, timber veneer bottom, balsa rails and balsa inserts for the channels. I’ll post a build sequence when I’m done.
Nice work JL…I had reasonable success years ago on a single fin , with channels parallel to the centre line…on a thruster or quad that requires canted channels , the degree of difficulty goes up quite a few notches. Theres two main problems to deal with = the depth of vee in the channels ( which pulls the skin further away from the line of the cant) , and the fwd point where the channels blend back into the bottom contour…a build thread would be of great interest… cheers
new post for build thread here…
http://www.swaylocks.com/forums/timber-veneer-channel-bottom-and-blank-hot-wiring
JL , I just clicked on your link and got “ACCESS DENIED”…(lol)
That’s the link that Sways auto emailed when I posted. If I click on it I get ACCESS DENIED to, until I login, then I see the thread??? Not sure what’s going on.??
worked for me…
here’s another try:
http://www.swaylocks.com/forums/timber-veneer-channel-bottom-and-blank-hot-wiring
Still doesn’t seem to have public access… I thought it’d show up on Sways home page also?
Looking nice…
how about making a reverse mold of wood/rubber/silicone that you can use as a call in a bag to press in the shape against design to “mold” the veneer to the bottom contour?
That’s how wood workers would do it as well as plastic engineers.
form the shape with a male and female part
be neat to create a hot wire knife pattern of the desired channels using that moldable stiff flat wire and cut out the shape from EPS to get a male/female mold.
The Babooze angie(reno)-neers in ewa beach would cut the pattern in a flat sheet to get male/female then bend the flat sheet into a rockered blank skinning the bottom on at the same time with the male remnant pressing the bottom skin into the channels while bagging the blank. We usually build the boards backass-wards this way by sculpting the complex bottom contours first into a flat sheet(like the gemini) and then bending the already shaped bottom into the top sheet to make our blanks. That way when you finish making the blank the bottom is completely done concaves, vee’s, channels, and bottom skin layer.
I guess we’re lazy, but we have to “set” a temporary rocker on our home made blanks using the bottom skin/glass before we lock it in with a perimeter stringer.
What I’ve done is copy a al mimic single to double contour map from sheets of glass mats and UV and then use that to press in the single to double as we used the same board(flyer) as a rocker table to make our fryer blanks. Alignment is the challenge. But then we’re just goofy from all the ddt, model airplane cement and diesel oil fumes out here in gondawana land.
Anyway I like my 8 channels soft these days, less whitewater turbulence than the standard 6 sharp edge, a burly guy named poppler showed me the way.
Oneula , that would work , but not with a veneer of wood. Somewhere in the process , there must be a relief cut , and it must be exact. Two things happen = you either get splits in the venneer on the side of the channels , or you get a bubble further from the tail , caused by the veneer pulling in and crowding. You could pre-mold the veneer maybe by steaming , but both the pre-molded skin and the shaped board would need to be perfectly matched to avoid air pockets between the substrate and the veneer , which would mean instant delam on the first hot day. The answer could be seperate peices laminated in , to be shaped into the channel sides , but that would not be the same as a one-shot vaccuming of a channel bottom…Ive had headaches from thinking about this…(lol)