The Glassing, the painting

As promised, a much quicker post than the ones.

As the title says, in this post I'll be showing you what I have on the glassing I've done, and then a quick bit on the painting.

Along with the Fibreglass that we've already trimmed, we're going to need Resin. Now there are a fair few resins that are available, but not all of them will suit the purpose we want them for.

 For example, The resin I used to use for Boat building was........( Big Breath in ) A Rigid Orthophthalic Polyester Resin....whew. This was used for laminating everything, a good durable resin, but had wax added to it. The reason for the wax? With the wax added to the resin, when the catalyst is added and the resin goes off ( sets ) the result is a hard surface, not tacky or anything, just a good result. The wax is there to seal off the outside of the resin and make sure it goes off completely basically.
When laminating our board though, we want a Colourless resin without the wax. This is because first we'll laminate the board with resin and the fibreglass, then apply a " Hot coat " layer to the whole board.

Resin can be sought from either a fibreglass specialist in your area, or even some hardware stores. Most times these days you can just ask for surfboard resin, if they don't have that, ask for a wax free polyester resin, preferably without colour too.

Gloves , Mask, Icecream containers stirring sticks, and a Squeegee will come in handy today.

Even though this resin is blue, once mixed, it turns clear. How cool is that?

Now looking through my photo's I can see that there are some steps missing from what I'll be writing, My apologies for that one.

Lets set our board up.

Place the face up on the table or stands you are using. A good note to add here is that you'll want at least a 300mm gap under the board if you are using a table, when it comes time to squeegee the Glass down, you need to be able to reach under the board to press the glass on.

On top of the board about 30-50 mm in from the edge, we will run some 1" or 2" tape all the way around the board, As you'll find out, resin likes to flow and form drips on the undersides of anywhere it can, this tape will help us from getting these drips on our foam and having to try and sand them out.

After this, turn the board bottom upwards. Now we are ready to go.

 Place you're layer of trimmed glass on the surface we are glassing ( the Bottom) and mix up some resin. The amount you need will vary depending on the size of your board, in the photo above, I mixed up just under 1 Litre, this was an ample amount for this board. Have a squeegee ready, once we mix the resin, we don't want to be slow pokes, this stuff doesn't take long to go off, even quicker when it's warmer. Polyester resin is mixed at 1% ratio ( Hot days ) meaning for the Litre of resin we have, we only need 10mls of Catalyst to be mixed in.

Once mixed, pour the resin up and down each side of the stringer ( the wood in the middle of the board) trying to keep close to the stinger. With the Squeegee, we will work the resin to the edges of the board. Try not to push on the squeegee, let the squeegee do the work, we don't want to stretch the glass out of shape.
  At the edges, once we run our squeegee out there, it's a good idea to hold the container of resin under the board to catch the run off ( you never know, you may end up needing it if you are short on resin for this layer) for the layer, we need to make sure we push the resin around a wet the glass out, at the same time, with the weight of the squeegee, it should also be pressing the glass onto the foam. If you see an air bubble, we need to work that out, just push it to the edge and around the rail and out from under the glass.

 The rails are important here as well. This is where stands come in handy rather than a table. Squeegee the resin around the rail and stick the fibreglass to the underside of the board, making sure we get rid of all the air or wrinkles we may get. Now, I'd be lying to you if I said my board was a shining example of what it should be like, but I'd be lying, up until this point, The most I'd done on boards were some minor repairs. So find your groove if you can, and quickly, as the resin and temperature  dictate how fast we need to move.

Paper placed under the job will stop you from making a real mess on the floor.

 Once this has been done we need to wait until its cured, within an hour or 2 should be fine, you'll realize there is a slight tack to the surface of the resin, this is fine as it will help our layers bond together better. Had we put wax in, this would be smooth and tack free, but means we would need to sand the fibreglass back for the next steps to bond to it.

Flip the board over, remove the tape and inspect any bubbles on the edge or drips, if there are any, either cutting them carefully, or sanding the down, will make the top layer easier for us to laminate. Again you can run the tape on the underside to lessen the drips. The only difference from this layer and the bottom, is the extra layer of glass we have, this is no problem as we can place the 3/4 piece under the full layer and the resin will seep through and wet both layers up. Take note from how much resin you had left over from the last layer, and adjust the quantity if needed, remembering that the extra layer will require a little more resin. Mix Up and away we go!! Just make sure this time that you have indeed wet the layer underneath the top layer, the last thing we want is dry glass!!!

The tape hanging down on  my board was okay, but maybe a little too close for comfort in some places

At this point if you have an old board like I did and want to put some colour on it feel free, I used some red and yellow spray cans that I had , just masked out the design I wanted and painted away

An old retro colour scheme. The pin striping in this later reacted to the hot coat, now I need to put another hot coat on to fix up the peeling it caused when I sanded it back. Also after I fit the fin in a hot coat will just tidy up the fin sockets.

If you started with a clean new blank, then painting can be done before we even start glassing. In my case, the old foam and repairs previously were no good for painting on.


The "Hot Coat"

The hot coat is just the resin we have been using, with some wax added to it. Not your standard wax either, this stuff you'll need from a specialist store. Its a styrene wax. not to be confused with straight styrene. 

 The hot coat is the layer of resin that we will use to sand back and give our board a nice finish, it also fill pin holes or slight dents in the board for us. Mix it the same as the previous brews of resin, only this time, crank the mix up to 4 or 5 % catalyst even 9-10% if you think you can work fast enough.
 this resin we can pour on the board ( easiest to start on the first side you did ). And instead of a squeegee, we can use a 3-4" brush to give us a nice even coat of resin over the whole bottom. The added catalyst means the resin will set far quicker than the last lot, When using this resin, I found it flowed out for a lot longer than the resin I was used to, having the extra catalyst meant it was hopefully going to stay where I wanted it to rather than run off the board.

A CAUTION HERE!!

It's also called a hot coat for a reason, if you have any resin left over from this mix, I strongly advise you to put water in the container, Even a good amount of left over resin mixed at 1% can start to turn purple with heat and give off nasty fumes and smoke and potentially set fire!!

After completing both sides, we can sand the board down. This is to make it look nice and remove any grit or dust that has landed in the resin. You can start with some 220 grit then 500, 800 wet and dry ( making sure we don't sand through the resin ) and leave it dull looking, or as I did, 220,500, 1000 ( all on a DA sander ) then polished it up using some cutting compound and my polisher.

So thats it really, After that I ordered my fins in from http://www.shapersaustralia.com/. Now it's a case of putting them in, which to be honest is a bit of guess work as I haven't found any instructions on how to do it haha.

The next posts will be of some of the stuff I've been filling in my time with after moving to Wellington, plus the new Big project as well.

See ya all soon
N

The " Lil Bastard "

As promised, it would be rude not to bring you up to spec on the board before I jump and show you the next couple of projects, If I can sort through all the images I seem to have been taking.

The last post of actual board construction was taking off all the old glass and patching up the foam.
The next step after this is to put some new glass on it. You could always skip this process and go straight out on the water, But you'd be back in no time with what would resemble a soggy noodle.

As always, Safety First, and second and third. So what are we dealing with in terms of materials, this is going to dictate what we should be using in terms of PPE ( personal protective equipment).

This job will use Resins, solvents, Organic Peroxide ( MEKP catalyst ) fibreglass roving. Hazards would be , but not limited to, Harmful vapours, spills, chemical burns.

 

 

The basic PPE , and some other gear needed.

 Gloves, and a Respirator are a must! My respirator has been fitted in this photo with some 3M charcoal Filters, these come in different types and grades so you'll need to choose the right one for the job you are doing eg, dust filters....no good, the fumes from the resin will go straight through them. The gloves should be solvent proof, the reason being that the last thing you want is to put your hands in resin or Acetone, and have the gloves fall apart also if you were to spill MEKP ( Methy Ethyl Ketone Peroxide , whew) they would need to withstand this as MEK, for short, will burn the skin if left on without the need to be mixed with anything prior.
  A well ventilated area should be chosen as build up of fumes or vapour, can also irritate the eyes. Quickly whilst on the subject of eyes, These are a common forgotten area of protection, in this case I only have my half face respirator, meaning my eyes would be exposed to fumes and create an entry into the body of solvents if it weren't for the extremely well ventilated area I chose for the glassing. If your area isn't as well ventilated, a Full face respirator or even an air fed respirator would be good.

 Before we can start resin coating the board, we need to make sure our roving ( fibreglass ) is trimmed to the shape we need. How do we go about this? first unroll a length of glass at least 50mm longer than the length of the board you are glassing. For this board I'm using 4oz matting so I'm going to need 1 layer for the bottom of the board, and 1 and 3/4 layers for the deck or top of the board.

4oz boat cloth.

Wait. hold up Nick why 3/4 of a layer? I'll explain this in a wee bit.
Start with the bottom of the board. place the rough trimmed glass on and weigh it down. You could use some books, smooth stones, or as I did some light lead weights, This is to stop the glass moving a lot or blowing around when we trim it to the exact shape we need.

After setting this up, use a pair of scissors to trim the edges 25mm away from the outline of your board. A trick I learned here was to place a light ( hand held is best ) under the board whilst trimming, this creates a shadow on the glass where you need to cut. You can also save time here and trim the top layers too if you'd like, same process as the underneath, only this time the 3/4 layer will be the first layer, then a full layer, like the bottom, will go over that.

The 3/4 Layer

Being the part of the board where you'll hopefully be spending most of your time. it needs to be more durable than the bottom, it has to deal with the constant battering you feet will provide it with whilst taking off. Now as seems to be the  case when I take photos, I have managed to miss a photo of this 3/4 business to make it easier to explain and understand, so bear with me and hopefully I can explain it well.
 To trim this, we follow the same steps as the other layers. We roll out and only trim a length 3/4 of the board. When we place this on the board to trim it needs to over hang the tail by 25mm and the rest will go up the board, falling short of the nose ( due to being a shorter length).The reason it doesn't go all the way is due to the fact we don't often use the nose to jump on, For a short board anyway, If you have a long board, you may want to take this second layer all the way just incase you feel like hanging 10 or have your dog on the nose.
 Now we have a layer that creates a line across the board, with this edge, we'll trim it into a broad point that points at the nose.

That's the trimming out the way, next step is getting it stuck on the board. I'll do this in another post ( no where near as long as the last post was.) As I have been typing for what seems like for ages, and to be honest, I'm hungry and need to look at what's for dinner .
See you soon
N

Return of the Stranger

Well now, it has been too long since any progress report has been made on any project I've been doing. So here I 'll try and bring you guys up to speed.

 I have recently moved from Auckland to Wellington with my Fiance, Originally we moved because of a change in career for myself, yes that's right, after 10 years of work as a boat builder I left the company that had still decided not to invest in me. The change was to become a Roofer, sitting an apprenticeship that would've been 2 years......Problem. When I moved here ( Wellington ) the Company doing the apprenticeships, had decided not to have a host company sorted out for me, and really looked like they weren't trying to hard to start finding one.

The Result? Well I picked up some Temporary work doing bits and bobs, and have now been doing temporary work for Kiwi Rail as a Spray Painter at their Hutt Valley workshop. Super Fun and super busy.

So enough of the background, what of the projects? The surfboard has been put on hold for the time being, although there is still an update on the last time I showed it off. Why on hold? Only due to the fact of leaving my old company and moving, but it will be finished, if it's the last thing I do.

After putting the board aside, I still managed to end up finding a few other projects to carry on with. Most of it has been doing up old drawers, although the latest one is an old Raleigh Bicycle from the late 70's for Nicole my Partner.

But first, I shall bring you the most up to date post on the board.