Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Paddle Board Building Class!

We are conducting the paddle board building class at St. Louis Sail and Paddle.  This post shows the November / December class.  New classes will be offered regularly, check the "Classes" link above.

The students have designed their decks and we are close to finishing the glue ups.  Next week we will be glassing the decks and installing deck gear (leash cups/tie downs, and access port and a breather vent.)
If we keep up the great progress they can be paddling in December!




Sunday, November 11, 2012

New mold

We are co-designing and fabricating a new line of boards for a local company.
The details of the board will be announced with the launch of the board, but some of the construction details are our processes and fine material for the blog.

The bottom plug of the new board was gel-coated last week.  This was the tooling gel coat that will be the working surface of the mold.
Then Friday and Saturday the backing glass was layered onto the mold.  When you wet layup glass with vinyl ester and probably poly ester you begin to appreciate why these resins are referred to in the industry as laminating resins.  They do not have the adhesive properties of epoxies, they are sticky but function best sticking to their own laminations.  These resins do not cure at the surface unless wax dissolved in styrene is added.  This prevents air from affecting the surface.  Air inhibits the curing of these resins.  So as you are laying down layers of glass and ester resins, you leave out the wax and the subsequent layers are able to chemically bond to the uncured surface of the previous layer.

It makes the building up of wet molds easy.
Today we cut a clean edge on the layup with a thin mineral disk and used a chisel, wedges and time to separate the new mold from it's plug.

The mold looks great. We will cast a test part this week.



Monday, November 5, 2012

Give me that old time Machinist

Charlie C. at Industrial Machine Sales in Alton, ILL. is on the job.
We spent several hours coming through his parts bins a few weeks ago to come up with items needed to fabricate the slickest shaft machine ever.  His system of organization is chaotic but he found some great parts.
He was unwilling to sell me these parts though, unless I hired him to build it.  He really wanted to do this so how could I say no.
Last Friday, Ingo and I played hooky and drove up to see him.  We delivered some missing pillow block bearings and gave him the latest specs we needed from the machine.
He gave us a brief lesson on good machining and he was off to the races.
In a few weeks we should be spinning shafts.