Alright, it’s showtime! We’re going to start glassing with the bottom, but first we have some prep work to do. We’ll need to think about how we’re going to glass the rails. There are two ways to do this. One is a “Free Lap” which means we stick the rail lap up on the deck however it lands and pray for the best. The other is a “Cut Lap” where we tape off where we want the rail lap to end.
Often I hear that beginners should start with a free lap. But as a beginner things can get messy when you are glassing the rails and my feeling is the chance of getting some rogue strands of glass stuck on the deck that you really don’t want is high. Taping up the deck gives you a safe zone so when you get a rogue strand of glass you can just push it up on the taped region.
Speaking of the taped region, often I’ll see YouTube videos from pros where they only tape a few inches into the board. This is great if you are a pro, but when you’re getting started I’d recommend taping up all of the deck that you want to keep clear. I use masking paper for this and it works great.
With the deck taped up, we flip the board over and tape up the fin boxes. For futures fin boxes, 3/8″ tape will fit just right. Don’t forget this step unless you want an expensive skim board.
I like to rub a popsicle stick across the tape to make sure its sealed up all the way around.
After making several boards, I eventually made myself a rack for my fiberglass. Having the rack make it a lot easier to lay down fiberglass on my own.
For the X6, I’m going with a 6oz warp for the base layer and then a 4oz S-glass for the top layer and to wrap the rails. Warp glass does not drape or wrap very easily.
I’m not wrapping the rails with the base layer so that one is cut right to the edge of the board.
For cutting glass, I would highly recommend picking up a pair of heavy duty shears that you can sharpen. Cutting glass will very quickly dull an average pair of scissors. By quickly, I mean you will feel it by the time you’ve cut one layer of glass. Some folks recommend buying cheap dollar store scissors and throwing them away but that gets real wasteful real fast. Instead I picked up these shears and this sharpener. Long sharp shears will give you much cleaner cuts and it’s really worth it over anything you’d get a dollar store.
I should note here that often surfboards are made with only one layer on the bottom and two on the deck. I’m doing two on both sides because I’m making a kiteboard. The forces in kiteboarding is a lot stronger and applied for longer so kiteboards need to be stronger.
When you are pulling out your top layer, be careful not to catch the base layer, you don’t want that slipping off. Once you’ve got it cut to the length of your board, it is likely that you will see it draping much further than width of your board.
You will need to trim this back. I like to start by cutting darts at the corners. A dart is a slit in the glass that relieves stress where the board curves. This will prevent a bunched up clump of glass in those areas. When you cut a dart, stop at the bottom of the board. If you go up the side, it will pull apart and likely leave a bare spot.
Now I’ll trim down the rails. You want enough glass to wrap your rail and go up onto your masked area on the other side by one to two inches. Get under your board and fold up the glass to check and be sure and don’t forget that you can take more off but you can’t put it back on.
When you glass the board, you will start with the rails and then fold up the tail and nose. Keep that in mind when you are checking how the glass will overlap. Where those overlap, you will want to take off as much glass as you can to minimize that overlap. Ideally you’d have perfect seams but if you can’t have perfect then you’ll want a little overlap but the more you have the more you’ll have to sand later.
Once your done, you’ll have something that looks like this.
You can see in that picture how much I took off at the corners. They still overlap but just a little.
If you want to add some graphics or text, print it out on rice paper and roll back your glass to place it.
Rice paper will dissolve when using polyurethane resin. It doesn’t really dissolve in the epoxy I’ve been using. In previous boards I’ve place my text under the glass and epoxied on top of all of it. But this has left rice paper “halos” that you can see on the text. For this one, I tried to wet it out first but that didn’t help enough to make it worth the extra step.
Whew! After all that prep you’re ready to glass. Unfortunately, because glassing a board is messy and time sensitive, I can’t take pictures while I’m doing it. Rather than try to explain it to you, here’s a video of Matt Holladay from Heirloom surfboards. I really like his process so I watch portions of this video to get myself pumped before glassing. There’s a big chunk of him mixing up colors that you can skip but the rest of it is a great walk through of the process.
Alright, here’s the X6 with the bottom glassed and starting to cure:
