Ohhhkay- a few things you’re missing-
Those fins are made of soft plastic, next thing to rubber. They flex, a lot. This is real good for beginners, who are likely to have something like this and get in the way of their own fins, bang said fins into a myriad of other things like doors, cars and the groud or the beach. But if you were to try to glass them, well, the entire fin would have to be encased in pretty stiff glass in order that the fin wouldn’t flex and bust loose of said glass. They use that screw-through-the-deck arrangement for a very good reason, it’s pretty much the only way to hold the things on there.
Ah, but we’re not done yet. To glass the fins on, or if you got some standard glass surfboard fins, you need to glass them to something. And the bottom of that board isn’t it, indeed it’s a polyethylene sheet material that is glued, not glassed, to the underlying foam. Polyethylene is slippery stuff, you use it where you want things to slide. Resin will not stick to it. A flexible glue, like contact cement, will stick it to the foam but that’'s about it. Again, those screw through the deck fins are used for good reason- it’s about the only way to get fins on the system.
Awright, now, the deck. That’s a polyethylene, if I remember right, foam. When Tom Morey was first building boogie boards, which this is a lineal descendant of, he stumbled across a cheap foam that they used in making packages, like they use to ship you a laptop computer. It cuts lovely with a hot wire setup and takes contact cement nicely.The foam is extruded in billets, call it a box shape, That has a skin on it, which is taken off with a pass of the hot wire cutter. Shazamm, says Morey, that’s just the stuff to glue to the outside of said boogie board. Later on, a company close to me called Packaging Industries built a helluva lot of boogie boards both for their own brands and for others, private labelled as it were. And they used it for later soft-tops like yours.It doesn’t take resin worth a damn either, glassing something to it is like trying to glass to tapioca pudding.
So, we get to the foam. Yeah, it’s styrene foam. But it’s molded expanded styrene foam and not very good at that, what I’d call ‘cooler grade’. It is not the very different extruded styrene stuff you want and can shape, which is made in billets like the packaging foam I described above. They put some sort of wood in the mold with when they built your board that looks like it came from a motorcycle crate to initially stiffen it, but it has all the structure of a straw in the whipped cream on top of an Irish Coffee.
You can’t really reshape this stuff. You can’t really glue it back together with any strength at all, there’e just not enough structure to do that, and you can’t wrap it with glass to hold it together either, because the glass won’t stick to it at all.
But wait, there’s more. See, you have to use epoxy on this sort of foam. Polyester resin is fine on polyurethane surfboard foam, but that resin includes styrene monomer which dissolves polystyrene foam, turns it into something like Marshmallow Fluff, a gooey, sticky semi-liquid substance that really doesn’t work very well as a surfcraft… So you have to use epoxy, and epoxy isn’t cheap. I don’t know where you are getting that $62 figure, the epoxy resin alone will be around double that. Then there is glass cloth, fins, stuff to glass with, sanding gear, sandpaper, polish. Oh, and as you strip off the skins from this thing, well, a lot of that rather bad styrofoam will come away with it, and that tapioca pudding example comes back, lots of ugly granules and so on, chunks out of the molded thing, and by the way, the shape isn’t that great and this stuff doesn’t reshape…
the list goes on. Sammy is right, as usual. No matter how much time and money you put into this, it’s not gonna be worth it.
hope that’s of use
doc…
