Surfboard Fibreglassing

Once I had a finished foam core ready, it was onto the fiberglassing. There were some dents and marks in the foam from knocks during the making process but I decided to go ahead and fibreglass the board anyway and fix these later because I didn’t have any expanding foam.how to cut lap | Composite Cornerhttps://compositecorner.wordpress.com/tag/how-to-cut-lap/

I will be using the cut lap method for the rails of my board. This is where you use tape to mask off the underside of the board and then trim the fibreglass along this line. Masking the blankHere I am masking off the top deck of the board except for a roughly 10 cm area all around the rails so that I can have an overlap between the top and bottom layers of fibreglass. cutting the fibreglassI also had to make small incisions every so often so that the cloth would wrap around nicely. They had to be closer together and more frequent on the areas of the board with tighter curves like the nose and tail. unglassed boardNext, I laid the cloth out, Mixed up my two-part epoxy resin and poured it on the board. I found it was useful to have a ‘squeegee like’  tool to direct the resin (I used a bit of plastic sheet) and to pour the resin in sections to ensure I didn’t run out. glassed boardI found it was important to make sure the overhangs were fully saturated with resin before trying to stick them round, otherwise they didn’t stick nicely.

Surfboard Experiments

I have used hot wire cutters before and decided that this was how I wanted to get the rough shape of my foam. the picture below is my homemade wire cutter: The design is very simple: There is a thin guitar string stretched between the two wooden arms. this is powered with a variable power supply. The blue rope is used to tension the wire.

hot wire cutter

I bought some foam sheet from Wickes in Brighton.

foam sheet

I used the hot wire cutter to split this sheet in half.half foam sheet

This made it easier to handle and cut down to the surfboard shape.surfboard template cutting Tracing the outline of the board from my card template. I designed the board in AKU shaper and then fusion 360.

shaped surfboardI then hotwired the outline making sure I stayed on the outside of the line.rocker foam being added To give the board some curve lengthways (rocker) I glued some foam on the nose and tail. I used the hot wire again to rough in the curve.Shaping with a surform I then used a surform and apiece of wood with some 80 grit sandpaper stuck to it to make the shape to the template and symmetrical.Roughed out form I then traced some lines on the top of the board to give me an idea of how much to round off the rails with the sandpaper.final shape

Documentation Methods

Documenting for yourself

Practising Documenting experimentation. We were given 45 minutes to experiment with a way of making patterns. I used a breadboard with little jumper cables to use colours to make a pattern.Breadboard Using the red cables to make a basic snaking pattern.

snake pattern Using two colours now.Grey and yellow two tone pattern Trying to layer the pattern: wires overlap on two different heights.

Layered Pattern Trying a rotational pattern, there is much more space for a liner pattern than a rotational one like this because the board is long and thin. Rotational Pattern Trying a pattern with bending the wire instead of just straight lines. Bent all together to make the bends in the same place.line bent

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