If you do what everyones doing you get what they have got.....as far as I can tell diversity of design and construction is the cornerstone of sways. Innovation and experimentation has benifits and problems but thats no reason not to do it! In fact thats ONE of the reasons I love designing and building alternate boards
Its great finding interesting and unique solutions to design and material problems..and if I get some benifits over traditional PU construction , thats a bonus!
Also too much length and volume are the main reasons the average surfer is average!
i am not thinking that EPS if anwser to everything in surfboard design and can see many pro to PU boards . i am not really looking for a lighter board or some super board.
i am just young with three kids , lots of bills and new to board shaping.All i was looking at was different ways to get more boards and experance under my belt with out going broke paying for blanks, cloth and resin.
So looked over sways and saw that guys had made blanks by gluing up strips from sheets of EPS and thought it would be a good, cheap learning think to shape a EPS/ epoxy board like that, as the a sheet would be 1/4 price of a pu blank and would get 2 boards out of it, plus who wants to just be the norm and make what everyone else is doing, never did work out how to follow the rules well
Paul - you switched brands of Kool-aid. The guy wants some EPS. Help him out.
I love that you're pasionate about it but what difference does it really make? We're not exactly curing cancer here. It's just surfing bro. Make em lighter, make em heavier suit yourself. I like EPS. And I especially like the fact that it's an industrial material as is epoxy resin. You don't have to deal with all the hype that is the "surf industry" at all.
Of course you don't get the cool free stickers thrown in but we all have to make sacrifices.
hey antony. the cost of a surfboard in poly with glassons can be had for as little as 200$ im sure there are second blanks as well. i pay freight . you however can go and pick a few up they would be about 90$ each. very good value for a fine surfboard that wont suck water. is a blessing to shape. im not against new materials at all. i just dont think eps is the full answer. i have seen alternatives that are better. and ive seen better foam for a plain NON compsand surfboard. as far as compsands go its is pretty useful foam i guess but the whole pressure differential issue and water sucking ruins it for me. a nice bennet blank has a good rocker . you only need to skin and tune in the tail and nose. if you like lower entrys and thicker wider boards you use bigger blanks.
if i could get stringerless pu foam in midgets superlight. i would be using it as a core and using thinner skins. or just skin the bottom and perhaps with HD foam on the rail
we will prob come to a conclusion like that at some point huie and paul, but give us a break aye we just tinkering round in our garages having fun learnin some shit. remember you guys prob started there too and did the same sort of stuff.
cost is key for me and 30 bucks for a blank that i fuck i can handle 90-100 i will not. LOL
besides i shape my boards with a surform it would take me ages to do a poly!
i already bought a sheet of 28kg weight EPS to day, my plan is to set the rocker table that i have used for my wooden boards to the finshed rocker then lay ply on it to form a soild curved bench. i plan to make the center stringer ( 10mm thick redwood) to the excact finished size of the shaped board and then cut the 8ft be 4ft sheet into 300 x 2400 lengths.
after that lay one sheet either side of stringer on the curved table and glue with ados stro-bond the top and bottom sheets together and weight then to form the rocker in the board which should follow the finished rocker shape of the table. once the stringer is glued in i will plane the top down to meet the finshed stringer, hopfully giving me a blank very close to the finshed szie i am after
but as always good plans can turn out very bad and if it all turns to shit i will have only lost the time it took and the $36 i spent on the sheet
seems like you got it all sussed out bit like the kinetix advice you hve been twadling about
a piece of wood resembleing a surfboard is not the definitive for shaping
eps is not the ultimate answer silly is talking a lot of sense when you go the full circle you will understand mybe
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Na havent got it all sussed out - will let you know when I do.
As for my Kinetix advice, what do you do? sand, scrub please enlighten us. If my advice is that bad why haven't you jumped in and corrected me earlier. If there is a way around the scrub and sand routine for kinetix, post it up.
I have simply posted my experiences with different resins, some good and some bad. I know you havent been able to get RR in Oz - Once you have gone full circle you may understand.
As for your comment "a piece of wood resembleing a surfboard" - thats just plain nasty mate.
I know EPS is not the ultimate answer, but neither is PU. Its not a contest!
The full circle you say - sounds like twaddle to me!
yeah if i had it over again i would have gone and watch someone shape a pu blank, then gone home and done it myself. the fact is you can either use tools or not. if you cant sharpen a planer blade it is doubtful you could shape a decent surfboard. they key is having a pasion for tools and using your hands and eyes. if you have shown no interest in these activities until the romance of being a surfboard shaper gets in your mind, it is unlikely you will succeed. i spent a lot of money fucking around with eps now i can get good money for a wooden shortboard. but its all about shaping ability and PU shapes great and makes a very nice surfboard. it will be cheaper in the longrun and you will learn more. go and see a shaper and watch him do one and let him supervise your first. i made at least 30 compsand boards without even going near surfboard resins
you guys say polyurethane is not neccesary
well niether is resin that cost 30 bucks a liter
you guys go and make a 20 dollar piece of shit blank and then glass it with the most expensive resin you can get is just crazyness. use west system or some cheap epoxy for godsake. these threads are continously putting out bad info. go ahead and make the cheap blanks or pay huge prices for marko just dont expect anything decent looking. and that answers the question is it any good
Not in my opinion and ive done lots of them. and now i can make a decent comspand but i had to figure it out myself. no one gave decent info on how to do it ( besides a seed from bert). im giving it to you now and no one listens . you listen to people with vested interests or others that are deliberately misleading. chasing light boards is a f#cking crock
i got kicked off my own website for sharing info here. i could have closed it but decided not to bother. i like to have it for reference and know what to expect from people. and who i will share with and who i wont . so in that respect compsand was valuable
Koolfoam came up in a web search. Many of the EPS guys are just cutters and don’t actually make the stuff. It looks to me like Koolfoam has their own plant and that’s where you start. Buying construction grade is going to net you a crappy core that will leak and break easily. Quality EPS is a very different animal.
After you find a manufacturer who will work with you, and you know that they have good equipment capable of producing quality, you then get into bead types and sizes, aging times, pressures, steam temps, holding times, densities, etc. etc. If you don’t want to get into all of that you can buy from Marko, US Blanks, Austin, White Hot, American Blanks or one of the other companies who know how to run the stuff. As far as I know, no one in NZ or Oz has yet stepped up to make the stuff that’s available in the US. That’s not a slight to these guys just an honest assessment. We’ve had quality stuff in FL for 20 years with two companies who would make what we wanted. And any company who has modern equipment can make quality stuff if they care to. Most of the companies I’ve dealt with are great and I’ve never had one charge me extra to make quality.
Funny that the best urethane foam in the world is made specifically for surfboards. The best quality EPS in the world is made for surfboards. The best quality epoxies are made for surfboards. You’d think aerospace would have a corner on such things …
basically there is no good qaulity eps in NZ available. unless you go to bondor or foreman they will blow custom billets and bead and fusion… smallest block is about 3,000$. i sussed this out 5 years ago. anything else your wasting your time and even then no guarantess. the cost of marko blank is well above that of a perfectly good urethane blank with perfect rockers. rockers and foam that top 16 are riding. all those stupid aussies that dont know anything.
