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