Anybody in our group know a reliable resource for vac bagging surfboards?
I’ve got a customer who wants a wood veneer construction over Superfused EPS foam. Possible wood choice ranges from Paulownia, Redwood, Cedar, or Balsa.
Once shaped I need someone with EXPERIENCE to get the blank vac bagged with the selected veneer. I want someone that has done this before and can offer me any guidelines for the nose & tail sections if they need special treatment before or after the veneer is attached.
Please feel free to PM on this with any questions or contact info.
This is a wedding present for him and it needs to turn out spectacular.
Might wanna reach out to Drew Bagget of Inspried Surfboards in St. Augustine. He does all of Lost boards with the C4 (inner cork layer), C3 (cork deck) as well as wood veneers.
You may want to push this to general discussion. I think there are more than a handful of sways bros that do vac bagged boards. llilibel03 has done some really nice boards. Everysurfer has done some high tech bagged boards. I think these guys are in the Ventura area.
Bumped into Ryan (Lovelace) and he had a good resource. Thanks to him, sounds like Ry Harris @ Earth Technologies is real deal. Will check him out for my project.
Ryan is busy building and probably wouldnt have time to answer phone calls even if he wanted to. I can tell you that the answer to your question is no, his shop does not wrap the rails with the vacuum bagged veneers. They are basically cutting out the veneer and vacuum bagging it on one side or the other, depending on the build. That’s an oversimplification, but I hope this answer helps.
Doing the rails is the challenge. Years ago I was doing a lot of repairs and fixed a snapped in half Yater Veneer Surftech. Renny gave me the lowdown on the Surftech construction and pointed out the super fine angled razor cuts along the rails which allowed them to vac bag the curve of the rails.
He also told me they couldn’t make the curve on the nose and that’s when he fashioned his curved laminated noseblocks. He was really proud of those, and he should be.
Since those days, it seems like the relationship between Surftech & the COBRA factory ouside Bangkok, has waned considerably. Instead Firewire has taken over the planet, and I just shake my head and laugh when I see all their marketing claiming sustainability and how the “high expense of producing our surfboards forced us offshore”. Bullshit. You can land a board here for $140 which means you are making them for a third of that and can pour money into marketing, Demo trucks, rider discounts, and consignments in ever shop known to man.
Coroporations continiue to take over the ma & pa surfshops just like the big credit card companies swept thru America decades ago and bought up nearly all the pawn shops. Citibank, Visa & Mastercard figured the interest charged on a pawned item was even higher than what they could screw card carriers for.
I bought one of the very early Surftechs. The boys had a shipment come in and had to make a delivery run down South, so they dropped it at my house in Oceano on the way back North. It was one of the Velzy boards. Full wrap veneer (Cherry I think) with nice tail block and fin. They had to go by and see Dale while they were down there, so they got him to sign it, I know Dale’s signature, so I know it was the real deal. Signing the board was the only time Dale ever laid eyes on it. I was looking it over and noticed the razor cut along the rail. Karl and Fitz made the comment that they needed to work out a few things on their mold and jigs. As if I were that naive. Naive enough to not know what vacuum bagging was. Or; or their early attempts to keep it a secret that the boards were made at Cobra in Thailand. They didn’t improve their molds or jigs. But their Thai laborers did get better with a Vacum bag and razor blade. That board by the way was sold to Bauer from Santa Barbara. He boaght that board, a 10’ Phil Edwards and a Hynson Red Fin. Seems like there was a fourth board. Can’t remember what though. Heard a few months later that Bauer had passed on. This was sometime in the early 2000’s. You may have seen the boards floating around over there. Lowel
