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.
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