I’ve never seen so many high end badly twisted glassed boards as I have in the past month.
And these are being done by highly used production pro glassing shops whose employees apparantly can’t feel or see the twists in their end product or basically they just don’t care.
Is this something new?
Is this a result if laying cloth at an angle or using the new biaxial cloth or types of resins being used?
And why doesn’t it seem to matter to these glass shops pumping out hundreds of boards a month that the product comes in straight and leaves with a 0.5-2" twist. To see it all they have to do is just lay it on a set of flat racks like those that used to shape them in the first place. These are the same production glass shops that are putting out most of the stuff everyone is buying here either custom or off the rack.
And what responsibility does the shaper have in seeing such a defect to their work but then having no qualms in not informing the buyer.
Has it always been like this?
Or is this a new phenomena?
The more the layers of this onion gets peeled back for me
Another possible source of twist during glassing could be the stringer wood. If the wood is not properly cured and dried and had a high moisture content then the heat produced during the glassing process could potentially quick cure the wood and introduce bow, crook or twist to the stringer. Younger wood is also more susceptible to this issue as is wood with irregular or distorted grain patterns. I just thought I’d add this potential possible cause of twist to the list.
probably being laminated on uneven racks. it’s amazing how many glassers dont regularly level their racks…walls racks too.
could also be boards are still curing standing up…especially longboards have a tendency to twist on certain days that the weather changes drastically. in california it could be 50 one day and the next be 100, then back down to 50 that night. that spells trouble for day old laminations waiting to get hotcoated in the stand-up rack (which i dont like doing!)of a real busy shop. maybe their not twisting in the factory, but in the retail shop…they could be in a real hot, sunny spot in the retail shop? where are the boards being made? if boards are twisting out of the shop i work at i’d like to know about it to solve the problem…i’m sure who ever is making these boards would like to solve it too.
i had a board twist during the glassing process recently. i set it aside for the moment to finish some other boards. while i dont plan to sell the board, i have considered putting it in the shop for rental purposes. that way its not a total loss
I was in Nevs 7 or so years ago and what I saw and herd I never forget. Looking down the Production line of one of the biggest and most respected board makers on the planet I noticed a major twist in a board, I promptly checked over all the boards and to my surprise almost ALL boards had the same twisted look to em. At the time a good friend of mine was glassing there, he told me how he worked for next to nothing, in shit conditions his work was heavily scrutinised, and he got docked for any SMALL glassing defect. I mentioned the twists to the glassing boys, they told me that Nev was told about it and that he didn’t care…
Howzit craftee, Funny you should mention that. A board builder friend of mine was telling me yesterday that he sent some boards to WRV and a couple of them twisted in shipping. They were shipped in a container on Matson then trucked to the East Coast. I can only imagine that the containers get pretty hot while crossing the Pacific Ocean. He’s still waiting to get paid. I have seen so many boards twist, some right from the get go and some take longer, wonder what causes the difference. When I make a board for myself I buy the blank and let it sit on the wall racks for at least 6 months, that way if it twists, the twist can be shaped out of it. Aloha,Kokua
I’m going to guess the stringer. How many of you doing stringerless have seen this problem? I’ve done bugger all stringerless myself so it’s a bit hard for me to say. Mike Daniel, has warpage been a significant problem for you guys at Coil?
does it matter that the board’s rocker line is warped?
Cause alot of folks whose high dollar names are on these boards don’t seem to think so or at least don’t seem to think their clients who ordered the customs will mind that they are twisted. As well as charging an arm and a leg because its “custom”. Custom bent that is…
And if that is the case
then why the need for the high priced shaper and his ghost shapers in the first place and all the work put into “hand finishing” something that not gonna end up looking the same anyway. Pretty strong case for the costco disposable stick if that’s the way the industry thinks of how it should deliver product especially “custom” product.
I brought this up because the twist was eventually blamed on a bad roll of glass and the supplier made the glasser whole when the roll was returned but the shaper was out the cost of the glassing and the board if they didn’t want to just pass the problem on and hope for the best. But then you could blame the twist on the shipping process and wash your hands clean of delivering a defective product. Again that is if twist really affects a boards performance.
I bet a dirty handprint on the foam under the glass would be interpreted by the glass shop and shaper as having more affect on the boards performance and value than the fact the the board is skewed to the left or right off the rocker line a couple inches.
I was curious because it seemed like how hot a mix kicked in and whether the warp line of the glass was skewed during production of the roll could have an effect. It’s interesting to hear that racks and how you place a board in its first 24-48 hours while it’s curing could ruin it as well as heat changes.
If that’s the case then it makes sense that mass molded production under stringent environmental controls is the only way to guarrantee consistant quality while “custom” work is just prone to eventual failure especially in a manual “production” scenerio. Just seems like too many variables to control. Cause of 1 out of 3 boards are going out different than how they were shaped for the end client does that make sense at boutique prices?
Kind of like finding out the chef at your favorite high priced restaurant has been spitting in your food before sending it out all these years… I wonder how these same folks would feel if they found out that was the case… Just say oh well, it tasted good?
jus something to ponder when complaining about the current demise…
Could also be an issue with all this post Clark crappy foam out there. Clark was bad enough but a lot of this replacement stuff is not worth a damn. I’ve got 10 to 20 year old boards that have less deck dents after years of hard riding than some of the less than 1 year old boards some of my buddies have acquired.
Exactly, I sent out an email to the front desk of what might be called the worlds largest American sn… I mean surfboard company.
Highest cost, sanded finish, lumpy, bumpy, twisted, unsymetrical railed boards imaginable, but they got what they asked for from the ad for shapers, one year experience minimum.
tweeking the glass on the blank, unlevel lam racks and wall racks are some of the reasons for twist, but even with a digital level, 3 point wall racks, I still ran into a period of about 3 weeks that EVERY board was coming out tweeked. Never could put a finger on the cause of it, very frustrating
Do the boards twist during/after glassing or are they twisted before they are glassed?
All of the above. I’ve seen shaped blanks twist, boards twist during the glassing, boards twist after they’re finished.
Funny thing though, I’ve known a few people that actually liked how the twisted boards rode. Kinda like an asymmetrical shape except the asymmetry is in the foil instead of the outline.
I am the first one to bitch about “pro” shapers who turn out horrid pieces of crap, but in my years of detailed talks with other shapers who have had a customer with that magic board, there has almost always been a serious flaw with the magic board.
Some kind of a twist from storage or in the glass phase, when the “magic” board gets reproduced, it is the challenge to redo without the offending twist.
Invariably, without the tweak, the board rides nothing like the original.
So with all my pissing and moaning about symmetry, it seems to really have little effect of the ride in the end.
As one of my old mentors said “you don’t surf the same way back side as front”.
Still, I prefer to deliver an as accurate as humanly possible shape to every customer, they deserve it
if you have too much humidity and cold and you sand the board in the same day or after a few hours, you ll obtain a twist (and shout)
-some twist are because the shaper is a bad one (like 50% of the non custom ones),
is really funny to see that the shaper suppose that the blank is not twisted!! and start to mowing foam like an idiot
the final result is a twisted shape, always
all the glass steps and racks and weather conditions
with the longboard shapes I prefer to let stand up between the tail and the point of the nose (only 2 points touching the wall and the floor) than a wall rack that you have 3 points and the “dead” weight over the gravity
I was told by an old time board builder/boat builder/house builder/cabinet builder that some pretty horrible twists result from poor quality stringer wood. As somebody said here already, irregularities in grain result in strange twists, bends and kinks. And if you have a three stick blank, the two side stringers should be cut from the same strip of wood, then one inverted so the grain in each peice mirrors the other and works against the other when and if some kind of warping occurs.
Makes complete sense to me, but I’m sure that the guys doing “custom stringer” orders for the major blank producers fail to do this. In fact, I’ll be they don’t even know that this is how it should be done.
I think this is all pretty hilarious and a little sad.
The handcrafter is very much like Jim and is very particular and accurate and has been at it for over 3 decades.
the blanks are from the ex-clark guys who supposidly should know how to make a blank correctly
the boards are absolutely perfect going into the glassing shop because if needed he uses his router/rocker table to fix them before shaping them and still they come out twisted and with misplaced plugs. But apparantly no one else other than the shaper can see the twist. Maybe everyone is just used to it. The shaper is then ostracized for complaining about something that “doesn’t matter anyway” and still has to pay for all the “damaged goods”. So it’s up to the shaper now to decide to either dump them on their paying clients or dump them in the trash for a loss.
Is this the state of the state?
Kind of sound like it from what everyone is saying.
And probably why FW had those $100,000 USD in seconds they need to now dump.
It just doesn’t make any sense to someone from a “normal” business background as I could never get away with things like that in what we do as well as well as how most normal business transactions are done. But maybe this is normal in this industry and why it’s only continuing to shoot itself in the foot as its clients get better educated about the whole process and there are many other ways surfacing to get cheaper alternatives of a ever growing mediocred commodity.
If a designer/artist never knows what the end result will be after they’ve done made their contribution how can they make commitments to their end clients unless its was just all a bs process in the first place…
I understand now why there are no formal contracts, product warrantees, and legal raminications on any of the sales orders taken for this stuff but as prices go up and the end consumer becomes more educated about what they are buying from places like online bulletin boards, the industry is going to get regulated in one way or another…