Fiberglassing "The Wormhole" Hull 8/24/2010

I'm not sure what I had on the radio at the time, but I was listening to a lot of the classical channel and at night jazz, but right now I have Y Rock on WXPN on and a cold Sam Adams Irish Red (one of my favorite beers) in my hand.

These are stands that I made in 1983 when I first started to fiddle with dings in boards and such. It was difficult in high school to be involved in surfing because everyone else liked gambling and drinking. The stands withstood the test of time because I begged that my parents not throw them away even though I moved to Oregon. I am so glad that they are here because they are really really handy in all stages of the surfboard construction. there are lots of different ways to have stands, and some designs are more stable and I may look into those for my next board, but I will never get rid of these.
OK, take notes: This is S-glass, it is really nice, but the weave is really tight, which makes it invisible, but it is difficult to saturate with epoxy so only do it in single layers. Also, when working with wood I am always going to paint on a layer of epoxy beforehand on both the deck and the hull because in this undertaking, when I epoxied the laps, I didn't tape them off, it's not necessary, but the discoloration that you will see in my next post will make your skin crawl! It did mine and cost me probably 100 bucks and another 48 hours of work. It was bad. So, one layer at a time on top of already epoxied wood. I don't think the weight will be effected too much. Not sure.
After watching about 40 hours of Austrailians glass boards on Youtube I once again entered the lions den! Here I am using a white rubber squeegee. WRONG! They are made for polyester resin. Use the plastic ones. But this step went really well. I did record the outside temperature in my notebook that I make all my notes in, I think it was about 74 in the shop with the air conditioners on. It went really well. The glass was snipped perfectly at the edges, folded over nicely. Not sure if I want to use S-glass again tho. Too many micro air bubbles it seems.

*Dave Matthews "Crash" playing on the radio. Mellow tune, but kind of the bedwetting genre to me. My Discus fish "Blue" is staring at me.

OK in this pic you can see dry spots in the glass where the wood beneath sucked up more of the resin that in other spots! This is another reason that I wan't to put a layer of epoxy down first. You can see the fibers in the glass at these spots, but all in all, the epoxy really makes this wood "POP" doesn't it? Look at that black walnut! Frikken beautiful! I'm not sure about the adhesion of the epoxy to the walnut, I guess the only way to find out is to use the board!!! For many reasons, I'm going to make this my personal board and not sell it. Too much time was invested into it to assign any kind of price to it. I'd have to sell it for 7000 dollars to pay myself 20 bucks an hour and make a little profit plus it ultimately did not turn out how I wanted it to due to my inexperience and experimentation with backyard epoxies.