searched all the forums but my question is more basic then any of them acknowledge. What is so special about volan glass? is it the glide and strength, is it much heavier? why is it heavier?
Well, I wasnāt around when it was in full use, but hereās my explanation:
Volan actually isnāt glass, but itās a cloth that originally was used on virtually all surfboards. Itās roots actually come from the boating worldā¦Volan cloth was used for laying up some of the first fiberglass hulls, and is used to this day. What makes Volan special is the fact that the threads are thicker, making the glass coarser and stronger. Volan soaks up more resin, because the weave requires more glass to coat the cloth. The result is a heavier board, too. Look at any early/mid 60ās board (even 70ās boards) and youāll notice you can actually see the weave in the boardā¦not to mention a pronounced āgreen tintā on non-pigmented glass work. Nowadays, guys like myself who are into the āretroā scene have boards contructed using Volan for strength and weight (as was the question of my last posting), much like the way boards were manufactured back in the heyday of longboard surfing. Unless youāre having an āold schoolā longboard (or fish, as is the case as of late), youāre going to have to indicate whether you want Volan or not.
I guess the thing that Iām still unclear about is why Volan gives off a āgreen, coke bottleā tint. Can you guys explain this???
that was a fine reply. thanks.
Volan is not a cloth but rather a chemical bonding agent. regular fivberglass cloth is āwashedā or treated with volan and thus cloth treated in this manner is now known, correctly or otherise as Volan cloth.
As far as strength, wight, etc, I think that Doc, or Cleanlines excellenty answered this question a ways back. Iām sure the thread still exists somewhere.
Drew
Volan is glass, it is treated with a chemical to make it less likely to wick water. This was done for the electronic people on there printed wiring boards many years ago. In those days it was the only glass that the surfboard glassers used. It was not made for the surfboard industry. If you take S glass at 10oz. ( 1 yard X 1 yard)it will weigh the same as 10oz Volan. Volan is not as easy to work as the other glasses, since Volan can be seen through the resin, unlike the other types of glass which wet out clear. Volan takes tints better for some reason. Some people me for one like the green tint of the Volan glass. At most shops the charge you 30 to 50 dollars more for Volan, because of the extra time it takes to do a cut lap. Iām told that if a glasser can do 10 boards a day using standard glass he can only do 6 using Volan. If you are not right on top of a Volan glass job you can really make a mess of it, and after it is all done you can see the mess. I was there when all boards were glassed with Volan.
Drew, thanks for the clarificationā¦I stand corrected, actually, after more research I did discover that Volan is indeed the chemical agent used to treat specific fiberglass cloth as a bonding agent, and is not actually ātheā cloth. So, it is a fiberglass cloth TREATMENT. But, my understanding is, once this cloth has been treated it is referred to as Volan āclothā.
You also might hear some individuals referring to it as boat cloth, which I believe is due to its use on boat hulls, as well as Volan (the DuPont chemicalās) ability to repel water. This gives far more rationale as to why itās been applied to boat hulls, surfboards and sailboards. Also, more commonly youāll find this cloth comes in heavier weights, usually 7.5, 8 and 10 oz. Turns out Volan isnāt actually stronger than Hexcell E cloth, treated with Silene, but because it comes in heavier weights, it is referred to as a heavier cloth (soaks up more resin, coarser weave).
Iām not the expert on this, but find it interesting, especially considering itās place in surfingās history. Anyone out there know more? Iām guessing the greenish hue is an attribute of Volan, the chemical?
Bagman, do you know if Volan glassed boards have more UV protection than a standard cloth? Resist yellowing, perhaps? It seems like they would, due to the green hue. Also, my board is getting a blue resin tint top and bottom. Iām guessing the tint will be darker, especially around the rails due to the cut laps.
Actuallyā¦
Volan is neither a glass nor a cloth, itās a surface treatment. Kinda like Scotchguard, Sanforizing, permanent press or for that matter spray starch on your shirt collars - that sort of thing. It acts to give a slightly better bond with resins; glass being a silicon compound, resin being an organic compound -containing carbon and hydrogen, that is- and volan (and silane ) finishes containing both so they act as kind of an intermediate bridge to get the two different chemical compounds to work together. Just as an aside, most soaps act in a similar way, an -OH on one end of the molecule ( which acts on water ) and a C-H3 on the other end ( which acts on greases and oils) so itāll get oil and grease and such off your hands or elsewhere by acting to hook the greases and oils up with the water and let it wash 'em away.
Other than the surface treatment, volan-treated cloth is identical with non-volan-treated cloth.
Volan-treated-glass-ed boards tend to be stronger than those glassed with standard cloth. Why? Thereās one very good reason: volan treated cloth is typically a lot heavier than the 4 and 6 oz cloth used on most boards- 8 oz and heavier. They also tend to be heavierā¦'cos the heavier cloth is thicker ( and heavier, obviously) and wetting it out adequately takes more resin.
Back in the day, and I was around for that, most boards were glassed with 8 and 10 oz cloth. Which came with volan treatment standard, indeed it was probably pretty difficult to get glass cloth in that weight without volan treatment, even though it might have looked better with the pigmented or tinted resin glassing that was often used then. So, volan was pretty standard and all boards had this greenish tinge to 'em, especially on the cut-lap rails where youād have three or more layers of it. If you buy 10 oz plain-weave cloth now, usually itās volan treated too.
And with two layers of 10 oz cloth on deck, at least one on the bottom, much heavier foam in the blanks, those boards were much stronger than those made today with maybe 1/2 to 1/3 the foam density, 2 layers of 4 or 6 oz on the deck plus one layer of 4 or 6 oz on the bottom.
So the Volan treatment has gotten this reputation for adding strength which actually aināt so. Any improvement in strength due to the slightly better resin-glass bond is one of those gee, thatās nice, butā¦ things, on account of what generally fails is the resin-foam bond, which the volan doesnāt change at all but the denser foam and thicker, heavier and stiffer glass/resin lamination definitely affects.
Why does it have that coke-bottle-ish green color? Damned good question: http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elements/24.html sez that chromium ( which is part of the chemical makeup of the volan treatment) is used to color glass an emerald green, so the chromium compounds act the same way.
Ok, neat, doc, but why does it do that? It gets awfully complicated, quantum stuff and all which I donāt know all that much about, but basicly Iād guess that the chromium compounds absorb a little of most frequencies of light and allow the particular frequency band that corresponds to green through. ( Interestingly, so does very thin gold foil, though probably not through the exact same mechanism.) The thicker the layer of chromium-containing compounds ( as in multiple layers of cloth on rail laps) the āgreenerā it is.
Is there a doctor in the house? That is, one with a Sc.D. in Chemistry and/or Physics and a good background in p-chem, anline-derivative synthesis and /or quantum levels and electron states in various elements and compounds? Like I said, this is complicated stuff and my answer above on why itās green is just a barely educated guess.
hope thatās of use
docā¦
1 Like
Doc,
I am speechless. THAT is going the extra mile, and is why Iām so often blown away by the braintrust that exist out in cyberspace on this discussion site. Also, itās why I admire the guys who āwere thereā back in the formative years of the sport, and developed so much knowledge and wisdom about the art of surfboard construction as a result, and continue to share their knowledge today.
Your hypothesis of why Volan emits the greenish hue makes complete sense. Iām not a chemistry major, nor pretend to be, but the refractive qualities of Chronium (emitting green light) seems far better than a guess, but a proven theory.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify and educate.
-zed
zed, Iām not sure about the UV protection question. On your tint you need to make sure that the tint is UV protected. This is not a real problem anymore but it sure was a few years back. Also like I said all of my tinted boards, are glassed using Volan. Your are going to have to pay for a cut lap anyway for your tint job being the way you want it done, so why not go with Volan, unless you are looking to save a few oz. that is. It is my feeling that the foam is more important to how well a board holds up then the type of glass used. Classic foam is mush less apt to dent then say supper blue or supper green, and dents cause delams. They glass can only more so much before the bound breaks. If you set a piece of tissue paper on a piece of wood and push down on it you canāt push through the tissue paper. Now take a sheet of note book paper and place in on a piece of sponge rubber and push down on that and you will go right through the note book paper. What you will end up with is a heavy board that does not surf like most of the younger guys like to surf. It is harder to do a off the lip or a 360 on a heavy board, but they do surf well and carry the speed. Good Luck
Naw, Zed, it aināt wisdom, itās more like curiosity gone berserk. I wasnāt a chem major, indeed I took it for fun and curiosityā¦and got interested, and studied some, and asked some questions and to get even with me they made me an Organic Chem teaching assistant.
Now, the guy who ran the Orgo lab was a semi-retired German chemist of considerable ability who had specialised in color chemistry ( which was essentially a German-led science using aniline/coal tar derivatives to make dyes and such- note that Agfa and other German chemical companies still are out ahead on stuff like new color photo film technology ) who among other things had his name on the patents for the phosphor system used in color TV sets. Brilliant man - in his late seventies he could think faster and more clearly about complicated stuff than I could in my prime. Let alone now, when Iām doing well to remember where I put my wallet and glasses.
Just as an aside, the volan maybe emits the color, I think, in addition to transmitting it. Thereās a subtle difference - if you heat up something, for instance calcium salts, and it gives off red light, thatās emitting it. Likewise if you pump some other sort of energy into it, including electricity or light. If you send light through something like a red lens in a flashlight then all the colors except red are blocked - itās transmitting the red light. http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec05.html and http://javalab.uoregon.edu/dcaley/elements/Elements.html are kinda cool, by the way, and a look at the latter for the emission spectra for chromium ( Cr) shows a lot of stuff in the green-blue-violet range while it absorbs a lot of the red-yellow range and lets a lot of green-blue-violet through. Iāll have to think about that someā¦
Anyhow, you had another question about whether or not Volan will add any UV resistance. I donāt know, but I think I know how you can find out.
You see, UV spectroscopy is an important tool in chemical analysis. Most chemical compounds have well-mapped charts of the specific UV light frequencies they will allow to pass through ( like the visible light spectra in http://javalab.uoregon.edu/dcaley/elements/Elements.html ) and what they will absorb, how much and so on. And UV spectroscopes are found in most university chem labs someplace and water quality labs - they shine UV light through a sample and see what frequencies are absorbed and what are not. Now, if you know somebody connected with such a lab, you might see if you can do a trial with volan samples and non-volan samples ( in resin, of course) and compare the two sets for the gross amounts of UV thatās allowed through, plus maybe the frequency distributions - as I recall the higher frequencies are more energetic and likely to do more damage to the foam. For that matter, there may be charts already available for those which would be worth looking up.
hope thatās of use
docā¦
Doc,
Funny, as I was posting my reply I thought about what I said about ārefraction/reflectionā and realized I really meant ātransmissionā. Yes, it makes perfect sense. It sounds like the properties of Volan actually, in some way, screen out, or do not transmit certain color hues to pass through the molecules, but allow other colors to pass, i.e. green. It would be interesting to do a trial on Volan vs. Silene (or comparable cloth applications) to see what the UV filtering qualities are. Iām not terribly worried about my board, though, itās more curiosity. Although every clear board Iāve had has been glassed with non-Volan, every one of them has yellowed considerably, which is why I now almost always go with a resin tint. And Iāve noticed even the older boards with Volan yellow, but Iām curious as to the speed upon which they yellow. It would be an interesting clinical trial. Would DuPont perhaps fund this? Nowadays I use a board bag. At close to 800-900 dollars a pop, I now treat my boards accordingly.
Doc, your explanation is dead on. Here is a short boring synopsis of what that means if you are interested. The index of absoprtion and the refractive index are two properties necessary to describe the optical properties of ceramics (glasses), and polymers. The absorption coefficient varies greatly with wavelength, therefore selected absorption in the visible range of the light spectrum between wavelengths of 0.3 to 0.7 is the source of color. Light absorption is frequently due to a particular ion in solution called a chromophore, complex ions which produce particular absorption effects. Chromium is a commonly used coloring constiuent in ceramic systems like glass as well as polymers. It is a transition element characterized by an incomplete d shell. For gas atoms the electrionic transitions correspond to fixed changes in energy levels, and sharp spectral lines are observed when these transitions take place. In liquids and solids the ions are closer together and interact to form bands of allowed states rather than discrete separate energy levels. So the transitions observed are due to a range of energies so that more or less broad absorption bands are observed like the green color in glass. So to put an end to this madnees, when most materials are exposed to ionizing radiation (like X-rays, or UV rays), optical absorption bands in the visible and UV part of the spectrum are porduced. In the material there is a polarization of each ion present which has a substantial effect on the exact energy distribution of the outer electrons. These are the electron energy levels that contribute to color formation in the transition elements such as Cr. So these ions absorb light in characteristic ranges of wavelength such as green, blue, red, purple, ect. These changes are give birth to the description of colors resulting from specific chromophores.
Hope that makes some sense for those that care.
Hmmmmmā¦interesting ā¦
While Volan probably doesnāt have any especially wonderful UV blocking properties, thereās a bunch of compounds ( like PABA and other sunscreen stuff ) that do. Iām not familiar with the structure of PABA, exactly ( Poly-Amino-Benzoic Acid?? if I remember right ) so I dunno if itād work as a resin additive. It mixes with alcohol just fine ( I was on a boat delivery and met up with this Yale biochemistry professor who made his own sunscreen out of alcohol and lab-pure PABA ) but I dunno about polyester or epoxy resinsā¦though Iāll bet Greg Loehr doesā¦
Meanwhile, I use board bags too. Prevents sunburn and those nagging little dings you get just moving a board around.
hope thatās of use
docā¦
from the way back machineā¦
And Iām surprised Doc made such a blatant error about volan cloth. Just because it has a volan finish, itās not necessarily heavier. Volan comes in many weights, even 4 oz. Many people make this same mistake. They think āvolan = heavyā by default. Not true at all. As was already explained, volan is just the finish/binding agent applied to glass. It can be put on any weight (or weave) there is.
Really a cool thread but to simplify both volan and silane are finishes applied to raw fibreglass (it is called Griege), so they accept and bond better with the resin being used. There are more finishes than the aforementioned, but these are the common ones used with surfboards. Just think of a starch applied to cloth. If you want see the difference of a fibreglass without the finish - wash it with water or acetone (dry) and then put the resin on. This is a good question for Hank Johns at Graphite Masters. This explains why old cloth sometimes āreadsā on ding repairs.
When I started surfing, 20-oz. volan cloth, doubled wrapped on the
rails with a deck patch was the standard glassing schedule. Then double
10-oz. (top and bottom) double-wrapped on the rails (total of 40-oz.)
and a deck patch became common. The blanks were, indeed, much denser then.
My third board weighed 24 pounds and was lighter than anything my
friends were riding. You had to punch the deck of those boards pretty
hard to dent them. A punch that hard would practically go through
todayās contemporary boards. There were no leashes, so a board had to
be able to withstand a reasonable beating without coming completely
apart. Iām not sure just what year Volan became a āvintage optionā.
Somebody here will remember.
As board length started dropping in the mid-to-late
sixties, glassing schedules also got lighter. Some shapers even
experimented with stringerless boards to reduce weight. Mustāve been a
real annoyance for shapers not to have a centerline for reference.
Midget Farrelly Stringerless (G&S 1966):
http://www.surfresearch.com.au/mGordon_Smith1966_Farrelly_9ft6.jpg
So what happens to that chromium after the glass is treated?
A reliable source informs me that the process in which the chromium is applied and rinsed results in a pretty harsh treatment of the environment so all you 'green' retro hippies better think twice.
Lots of great info here. The young guy I am teaching is very interested in Volan. He wants to make some glass fins and seems to be convinced that volan is best or more flexible.
I was thinking that the resin may have more to do with it. Dion Isothalic was (in my opinion) the best resin ever made for boards. I hear you can get it again. Anybody have ideas on this???