Wide
style windsurf board building (the wrong way) by Stelios!
Well, this is how I did it. I made my first windsurf board using polystyrene/fiberglass,
following all the information I could find on the Internet and the details
I got from Nick Povey, from speedsailing.com.
Nick had already made his own wide style board with great success and
the technical information he provided me was invaluable.
Consider this as a warning: It is the first board I have ever built.
You had better take a close look at what I did because MANY things went
wrong. I hope that you will be able to avoid the same mistakes and make
yourself a better board!
1) Design the board using any program available. I used WSCAD, which
I downloaded from download.com. No fee required (yet) and this program
can help you by printing 1:1 templates on sheets of A4 paper using your
printer. No way to get the outline templates of a 90cm wide board! You'll
have to copy the points yourself and then use a marker to complete the
outline.
You can download the board's data here!
2) Buy wood and get the plans you designed on it. Cut the shapes and
there you go! These two are my rocker templates, one of them is to become
the board's stringer.
3) Buy the polystyrene core. I got four blue styrofoam blanks (2500x600x50
mm) which I glued in two pairs.
4)DON'T USE THIS GLUE to glue the pieces together. I did and it failed.
Get yourself a carpet spray adhesive. This will be enough to keep the foam
parts together until you hot-wire the whole core (that's Nick's wise advice).
Glue the foam blanks in pairs in order to get greater thickness.
5)Use the templates to cut
a.the board's rocker profile and
b.outline
(I did it the other way around and my core ended up having an ugly
nose shape)
6) Don't get rid of the offcuts yet. You might need them later on.
They make good living room decoration ;-).
7) At the end of the day you should have something like
that. These are my board's EPS core parts, glued in two pairs, seen one
above the other.
The problem was that I didn't cut the rocker line first and I got into
serious trouble later, when I tried to shape the nose.
8) Fit in the stringer. Yep, that's my stringer allright.
And I thought it was a good idea to use only one stringer to cut the rocker
line with my hot-wire cutter... I was wrong.
9) Board powered by DOW Wallmate EPS! :)
10) Using Nick's board parameters to position then finbox and the mastbox,
I marked the location of the foam to be cut.
You can see the Chinook mastbox and Tuttle finbox inserts over the
centerline of the board.
11) More on that... That's the finbox allright.
12) I got the dimensions on the stringer so that I know where to cut
it and get a good fit.
13) This is the very bad result of my attempt to hotwire the board's
nose using the board's stringer. If you think this is ugly then wait till
you see the othe half (board's bottom). My hotwire cutter proved to be
inadequate for cutting large parts of styrofoam.
14) From this low-res image you might be able to notice the bad looks
of the board's lower surface.
15) This is my attempt to repair the core's
damage. I used construction PolyUrathane foam where the board had been
badly cut and waited for it to fully cure. Bare in mind that polyurathane
expands about three times its initial volume, which is something we wouldn't
want.
I guess I didn't notice that at first... :)
PolyUrathane acts as an amazing foam adhesive, too! Unbelievable results,
but it does leave a gap between the joined foam pieces because of its expansion...
Sorry guys, no photos from the shaping. I took the board to my friend,
George. He and his father helped me really much and I now
wish I had taken photos of all the amazing things George's father,Nick,
came up with to repair the hotwiring mess I had created.
At George's place we did the first glassing. 3 layers total, two on
the deck and one on the board's bottom surface.
Having used really thin strand mat fiberglass (60gr/m2) for the first
layer on the deck, it sucked about 1.5 kgs of epoxy! Damn...
The rest of the glass layers were woven E-glass, 300 gr/m2. It was
the only cloth that overlapped the board's surface and the rails.
16) Time to install the mastbox and the finbox. On the
left you can see the board with the two glass layers on top, and the stringer
between the two halves.I used my micro drill (a Triplex hobbie drill) in
order to cut through the glass, with grat success.
Notice how shiny the left half is. During lamination, George and Nick
were surprised at how fast heat can build up from epoxy resin in a can.
The resin started to boil while the glassing was incomplete, so they had
to pour the whole on top of the glass and pray for the best... Lots of
air bubbles and unwetted areas = reduced mechanical properties.
17) I used strand mat to fill the hole and act as a wall
when the hole would be filled with epoxy. I also cut a piece of cloth to
fit at the boxes sides.
You can see clearly how I used the strand mat.
18) I did almost the same with the finbox. The main difference
was that the hole is cut through the board. This means that:
a.You have to cut the stringer
b.If you are not carefull you will loose tons of epoxy which will drip
under the board and on the floor. A good alternative is to use epoxy putty,
or thicken epoxy with microballoons etc.
I inserted my fin, aligned it with the stringer,made sure it was perpendicular
to the board's surface which has no vee, put a lot of strand mat layers
on the sides of the finbox and wetted it with epoxy. It dripped a lot and
I almost got the fin wet with epoxy, but after a day the whole thing became
solid.
This is how I made sure the bottom wouldn't drip beyond
control. I used plasticine to cover the edges of the finbox, where it met
with the surrounding fiberglass. The result was satisfactory, still I wasted
epoxy on the floor because of dripping. After the first part of epoxy had
partially cured, I poured some more on top to make sure that any construction
gaps would be filled.
19) I still needed one more bottom layer and one on top,
but the boxes were already in. To avoid getting epoxy inside the boxes,
I used adhesive tape to cover them.
I used a razor to cut as much tape as I could, so that
the boxes' bottom would adhere to the fiberglass layer to follow.
20) Time for the footstrap inserts! 4 footstraps equals 8 inserts.
Each insert has two holes. There are many types of inserts one can use,
these were the ones I found cheaper and easier to install.
Put adhesive tape to cover the holes, or find your own
way of doing this because we wouldn't want to let epoxy fill them when
the final glass layer is laminated.
Mark the locations of the inserts. I used a modification
of the original DROPS FL13 footstrap positions. No testing done yet!
For the front straps:
I cut the holes with my drill and then used an old soldering
iron to burn the polystyrene locally. I used strand mat to fill the bottom
and the sides of each hole. I then poured some epoxy and inserted the boxes.
I think you should prefer to use epoxy putty, it should make things
easier when is comes to fixing the depth of each insert. With liquid epoxy
you can't do that easily.
Now I got the final glass layers, on the deck and on the bottom.
21) I did a lousy paintjob after that, using a simple enamel
paint (over which I thought that epoxy would adhere to give me a good surface
finish but it didn't). Well, DON'T try it.
DO USE EPOXY PAINT
and a spray gun.
In this photo you can also notice at the bad shape the board's nose
has. Under it lies the polyurathane layer, which proved to be quite troublesome
and an inadequate solution to repairing butchered parts of the core.
Well, enough of all this. The rest is history. You need a flow coat
on the bottom, anti-skid surface on the deck and some graphics maybe.
This is what the board looks like now that I've finished it.
It needs a flow coat and anti-skid but I'm a bit tired for now. I think
I'll let the paint wear off and use epoxy paint
to have it painted by the end of the summer. Haven't tested it on the
water yet... Wish me luck!!!
The fin is a 48cm Medium Slalom fin by FINS (with a Tuttle base). Although
I know it will be like wasting the board,
I intend to use it with my 6.7 NP Diablo, since it is the larger sail
I own. Don't ask me why I built a board for which
I haven't got the right equipment yet. I just liked it so much that
I couldn't resist. Hey, this thing planes much faster than
my Fanatic Pure Rabbit 298 does. :-)
News!
9-6-2001
Hey, I just took a look at the Starboard Start, on Starboard's website.
That thing weighs 13kgs! So, my board's weight isn't THAT bad. It's somewhere
around 14kgs but I'll need to measure it after I have it painted again,
using epoxy paint this time.
Oh, almost forgot. I'm almost through taking the bottom's paint and flow-coat
off, but it will need hard work... I got myself a belt sander and I hope
this will make things easier for the stages to follow.
7-6-2001
That's it, I've had enough of this ugly looking board. I'll
try to get the paint and that lousy flow coat off and give it a better finish.
I also intend to get a non-skid spray so that the board will become usable.
6-6-2001
We officialy tested the board! Thanasis gave it its first serious test
ride. The wind was onshore, once again, and there were small waves, however
the conditions allowed it to get on a plane. The crappy non-skid made
things really difficult for the rider, adding to the fact that the board's
fin is not big enough to push the board upwind. I will propably need to
get a 60 cm fin if I want best performance. The board's finish is a drama,
something everyone commented on at the beach. I suppose most people do
judge a board by its looks rather than by its performance on the water.
Now the good news: It planes earlier than my friend's DROPS FL10, which
is 70cm wide. It's square rails helped it go upwind after it got some
speed, but I think they are definately not suitable for rough water. The
board is hard on the rider, that might be because of the zero vee. I'll
have that in mind next time I start building a board!
5-6-2001
Well,we put polyester resin on top of the deck's paint. A part of the
enamel paint softened and started to wear off !
We ignored that and used sugar over the partly cured resin to create the
non-skid surface.
The resulting non-skid sucked bigtime but I thought it would be enough
for the board's first test.
3-6-2001
I did some beta testing at the beach. The weather was not
good, with light onshore wind and lots of waves = non planing and very unstable
conditions. It was almost impossible to get on the board without having
anti-skid on deck. I slipped several times and could not use my weight to
drive the sail correctly. The board got on a plane for a moment but I couldn't
keep it flat because I couldn't get my feet on the right position being
afraid of the slippery deck.
I still have no idea about its volume, but it took two of my friends and
me to be sitted on the deck before it started to sink. I had better fixe
this mess before I call my friend Thanasis to do the testing!.
4-6-2001
I just got a kilogram of polyester to try and see if it adheres
well to the enamel paint. Maybe this and sugar grains will give me the anti-skid
on the deck... I'll try it and let you know! I'll also be using epoxy putty
to seal the finbox.
There seem to be gaps between the core and the fibeglass shell next to the
top of the finbox. The board did take some water in when we sank it to calculate
its buoyancy, but the good thing is that EPS doesn't absorb water at all,
so it all dripped out when we flipped the board over.
