Woodies & baggers - whattaya think?

General Discussion
1

So I’m working on this summer behemoth. Started with a 12’ redwood 1/6 & a grand idea. Part Jensen surf/paddle board, part Aquafiend stand-up paddler, part take-my-son-out-with-me mini-tandem, part crowd/tourist control vehicle.

Obviously, its EPS / epoxy / wood in a vac bag. That’s all the rage this year, I’ve heard :wink:

So with a board that’s going to be 11’11" finished, there are some serious considerations that need to be given to weight, break strength, turning ability, etc. Not to mention being able to do things like physically get it in the bag or laminate it before half the resin goes off in my bucket.

I knew from the beginning that a few things were givens for this project: No ripping balsa to 1/8+" and laying on the strips - I’m going with wood veneer in 24" x 96" sheets. No laying up rails, 1 3/16" piece of balsa at a time, with this board, I’d feel like Noah. I wanted hips on it, so it would turn easier from the back end. I wanted a thin, pulled-in nose to pierce waves & avoid wind, as much as possible. Rails should be 50/50 but pinched.

So I started with 1# EPS in 6" blocks. Ripped to 1’ wide and glued 4’ ‘ers to the 8’ ‘ers. Hotwired using the redwood stringer and a masonite twin. So far so good. Skinned the bottom - little concave through the whole front half to decrease effective nose rocker on the stringer line and a little roll through the back half to help turns. Hacked 1.5" off the rails & put on 6’ long pieces of straight, solid balsa. Shaped all the rails on the bottom half. Into the bag with 6oz E & epoxy under the veneer. Veneer wrapping the rails like CMP & Oneula do. Again, so far, so good.

When it came out of the bag & I set to smoothing the veneer on the rails, skinning the top, and turning the top of the rails. It was just seeming like such a vast expanse of really, really light foam. So I started thinking about d-cell. But I didn’t really want a third layer of glass in the deck - we’re talking about 2 lb per layer of 6oz + resin for a board this size. I’d used 1/2" d-cell before for stringers and knew it glued to EPS really well with gorilla glue. So I went down to the boatyard and bought a 1/8" sheet of d-cell. Templated it, taped 4’ to the 8’, and poured out a whole bottle of Elmer’s brand polyurethane glue. I had to work fast with really heavy squeegee pressure just to get the glue everywhere. The d-cell soaks up glue like it does resin (duh :slight_smile: ) So then plop it on the board, align it, tape it in a couple spots, and into the bag.

Oh crap I poked a hole in my bag. Tape it. Crap its leaking somewhere else. Crap my pump is supposed to run for :30 every 7 minutes and its been running constantly for an hour & a half as I chase leaks. This bag must be getting old. Crap I better get a fan to cool down my pump motor. Crap the bag just developed another split. Waitaminute, Schwuz sent me a bag last year, I wonder if it’s 12’ long! Hey it is! Out of the old bag after 2 hrs, crap! The glue is sticky still and the d-cell is peeling up where I was trying to curve it down on the rails! I knew I didn’t use enough! Crap this bag is leaking on the end seals! But wait, its pulling 9"…The other bag never made it above 7…hey wait, the pump shut off. Did it Die??? Nope, 14". Wow. Thanks Schwuz, you saved my butt.

3 more hours, then out of the bag. Fully expecting the d-cell to come right off, after all the drama and the glue shortage. But holding out hope because once Bert said something about foaming glue (which meant I didnt’ have to spackle the wire marks & planer holes in the EPS :slight_smile: ) and because I still think its a neat idea and I could use a little triumph right now…

Holy crap! It worked! The glue is hard, the d-cell is pulled to the rails, the board is torsionally much stiffer but still flexes longitudinally, it hardly seems to have gained any weight… Its 11 pm and I can’t help myself. I start to take down the edge of the d-cell with a surform. Way too late for power tools. Quick into the house, I think I have a Bud Light somewhere. An hour later, everything’s smooth. Looks bitchin. I have to get up for work in 5.5 hours. But I’m ready to bag on the deck veneer and I trust that I’ve given the behemoth a significant gain in strength without much weight penalty and without adding so much stiffness that it’ll feel like a Surftech.

So Bert & others - anyone who showed me the grace to read such a horriffically long post - will this work? Did I stumble on something great or will I go home from work today to find the whole thing peeled apart?

Final cross-section will look like this:

Any input would be very much appreciated…

Thanks

2

Man are you hardcore! I can’t imagine putting that kind of work into a 12 footer. I think your plan should work great, I just don’t see how you will get the pay off in performance that I would want from the amount of work that kind of construction entails. You’ll save a lot of weight but it’s still 12 feet, you can only do so much on a board that size even if it’s light/ good flex etc. On the other hand it will be the best performing 12 footer you could hope for. Go big. I might do 6 oz S instead of E on the inner lam or a 3rd deck layer- there’s a lot of leverage to snap that board.

3

Ben

CMP just built 2 10’6"s like what your talking about 24-26" 4"-5" thick wide all the way down no curve…

I though they were for surfboard fishing… We have guys that build these monsters and mount a small outboard on the back and take all their diving or fishing gear out on one of these things without the need for a canoe, kayak or boat… Although you might as well be paddling one…

He said it was for some over 60yr guy over the 350lb range that need a big board. probably floats up to 450lb easy. It took up his whole shop so he had to rush and get them done cause he had to glass them outside they were so big…

you might want to drop him a line…

Oh p.s.

the D-Cell just added a ton of strength to the deck especially with the wood sandwich over the top of it…

CMP uses D-cell+wood and maybe some strategic carbon fiber on his tow-ins (6’x16" 14-20 lbs)

4

Loved reading the account of bagging the behemoth. I can imagine the stress when you were chasing leaks. I have been working on getting my set up air tight. It is not as easy as I thought it would be, I don’t want my pump to run all night and over heat.

How are you going to seam the deck veneer to the bottom veneer where they meet at the rail edge ? Im getting ready to vac bag for the first time, doing a few test runs and your post has given me some good insight into the process.

5

Thanks for the replies. :slight_smile:

Onelua, its definitely for surfing. The outside waves at my faviorite little fogless summer spot are like Queens - sometimes they just roll & roll & never really break. Dry hair paddle in all conditions. What does CMP use to glue the d-cell to the EPS? Does he use a heat gun to form the top rail bends or just the bag? Thanks again…

Marke, thanks for reading the drama :slight_smile: I haven’t dealt yet with the spot where the two veneers meet on the rail. The other wood veneer boards I’ve built have been bagged, rails squared, and thin wood strips laid on flat to the rail to thickness, then shaped back down. CMP & Onelua wrap the veneer and report its not too bad cleaning up the line, so I’m just going for it. I expect, once its out of the bag again, to have to sand away some bumps, bends, and splits. Then patch with little veneer pieces and sand smooth again. Hopefully it’ll all disappear under the exterior glass.

Last night I bagged on the top wood veneer. Again, I learned something good by accident. The other veneer applications, I’d cut the glass while it was on the blank & laminated it there, then laid on the veneer & pressed it down. So the veneer was dry until it hit the laminate.

Last night, I cut out a piece of red rosin paper first, to test fit the veneer to the deck, match the bottom rails, etc. Then I cut the veneer to the right shape on my workbench (good thing by bench is 12’! ). I saw it sitting there and decided to cut out the glass on that, to insure full coverage but not too much overlapping. Once the glass was sitting there, I decided to just laminate it on the veneer & then slap the works on the blank - the reverse of the other process (and because I know d-cell is resin-thirsty). Well, I ended up using about 2/3 the amount of resin I’d used to lam the bottom glass to the foam & the wood to it. Had to scrape tons of resin back into my bucket (and then lay up a fin panel with scrap glass). So that was good - better glass:resin ratio. So then I’ve got this giant floppy wet veneer and I’ve got to get it onto my board. So I turn the board over & lay it on the veneer. Line up the ends. I’ve got a piece of clear plastic film on my bench so I don’t get epoxy everywhere, and I start taping it around the rail to the bottom, to hold everything together as it goes into the bag.

WOW, the veneer is really soft from soaking up some resin! This is much better than trying to bend a dry, stiff veneer to a laminated surfboard!

So it all goes into the bag ok and I start up the pump. One thing I learned with the 12’ bag is there’s no way the vac pump will ever reach operating pressure unless you evacuate the air with a shop vac first. Chase a few more leaks, stare at it for a while, and go to bed. Its in the bag, the space heater & fan have my garage at 76*, and it held pressure all night. Went out this morning & shut off the heaters & vac pump. Will take it out of the bag & start cleaning up rails after the kids are alseep tonight…

One other thing I learned: The stretchy, thin, yellowish vac bag tube plastic works MUCH better than the thicker clear poly sheeting stuff. The thinner bag material is way easier to drag out from between the veneer & the board, holds more pressure, has less leaks, is less prone to developing leaks on a fold or a scratch, and is easier to seal. That was my first bagging material and I’ll go back to it for the next one. I got mine from ACP. I strongly suggest using that over clear poly-sheeting (visquine type) tubing.

I’ll get some photos up in a few days. Thanks again for reading.

6

hey check this out , just finished it a few days back …

the ultimate behemoth …

11’-6" x 25

this board is coincidently a similar lay up to the one you showed …

except the customer wanted the whole rail visable from the deck to highlight the cedar pinlines …

had to laugh at your narration of events …

sounds so familiar …

on that lay up it would have been advisable to put glass under the d cell as well , but your version will still have a touch more flex , that triple sandwich , just gets to rigid , so i think you did the right thing …

very impressed by your rapid learning curve …

all i can do is agree completly with your findings …

regards

BERT



7
Quote:
... that triple sandwich , just gets to rigid , so i think you did the right thing ....

regards

BERT

Thanks, Bert! That triple sandwich was exactly what I was trying to avoid. :slight_smile: But what other options would work?

  1. What I did: EPS.glue.d-cell.glass.veneer.glass

  2. Triple: EPS.glass.d-cell.glass.veneer.glass

  3. What about: EPS.glass.d-cell.contact cement.veneer.glass?

  4. What about replacing all or any of the layers of glass with 2oz? or with .5oz carbon matt cloth?

Do you ever use contact cement to apply veneer instead of resin? I don’t want to use wood glue close to the surface as it might show different resin pick-up colors than unsealed wood. I’m gonna have to fill some gaps.

Thanks, Bert, your encouragement helps a lot :slight_smile:

Ben

8

Once again, you are building what I want to build next. I’ve been playing around with building a mini-tandem so that my son and I could surf Dohene this summer. This would allow me to have a little more time surfing and a little less time pushing him into the waves. One thing that I was thinking of adding was hand holds in the area where my son would be. This way he would have something to hold on to while we were taking off (he’s too small to be much help paddling). Greg mentioned that he only uses is plastic bags once then gets rid of them. I can’t wait to see the pictures (you need to get a digital camera! I’m tired of waiting :slight_smile: )

9

I thought about handles, too, but I think my kids are big enough to hold on. They’re 7 & 5.

I know I should treat the bags as disposables, but I’m a professional recycler! I’ve gotta apply that to my diversions as well…

Dan, check your PM’s…(give me a minute first)

Ben

10

I would have thought that the bags were recyclable (at least thats where mine went last time). Did I make a mistake?