I am building my 3rd EPS/Epoxy board, this time a 6’2" biscuit. Deck and base are 0.6mm veneer over 6 & 4oz cloth.
With my previous 2 boards I applied 4oz glass over the veneer, then hotcoated. I got resonable results after a lot of re-work to remove air bubbles from between the glass and the wood. I also had a small problem with fisheyes.
I am at the stage with the Biscuit where the veneer is applied, and board is plenty strong enough, and I do not want to add anymore weight, so do not really want to add any more glass. Also I do not need the grief I had last time with finishing!
I am considering spraying the wood with Klarlack 2K lacquer in order to seal it.
has anyone else tried this, or any other suggestions to seal the wood with minimal weight increase?
Foam is ‘home depot’ so pretty light. I have carbon deck patches and a layer of pretty heavy bi-axial cloth in the heel areas. This is the same as previous boards and I’ve suffered no significant dents despite using them with a kite. This board also has carbon ‘tows’ let into the deck and base all around the rail perimeter, and 2 running longditudinal along whole length of board. No central stringer though.
Paul (i,e, Silly) discovered that painting and rolling your epoxy resin directly onto your wood skin and then laying your dry cloth over that seems to get rid of alot of the gassing and pin holes you get doing it the traditional way of glassing.
Others use a 30%+ xylene thinnned coat of epoxy to seal the wood before skinning the foam. The xylene helps penetrate the pores and then evaporates off. Silly thinks it jusrt adds more weight versus using the thicker epoxy directly on the wood
Go look up the early posts by Mike(Sabs) in 2004 he seemed to be the most successful of the compsand's out there otherthan Bert.
Also I have two customs balsa composites made by Jarrod(Shwuz) and those boards are ultralight for their size. Don't know how he does it but they weigh half of what I usually get.