Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Building a Snowboard

I finished with most of the work on the snowboard i've been building off and on for the last year or so. All that's left is mounting hardware. Here's a link to the picasa album with all the photos.


Core. Maple and Doug fir. The wide center strip will be the inner sidewalls for the splitboard. The core is 1/4" wider then the board so there will be 1/4 inch that needs to be cut out of the board after lamination.


Cutting out the base. There is a template underneath and a folliwing router bit was used.


Edges bent by hand and tacked in place with superglue. Epoxy during layup will more firmly attach them to the base and the layers above them.


Router Bridge for thickness profiling the core. The core goes from 2mm at the front to 7.7 in the middle then back to 2mm at the tail. The bridge worked ok but next time I will use a planer jig instead.



Core with sidewall. There are a lot of insert holes that need to be cut in a splitboard.



Dowels were used to align the core with the base during layup. The two base pieces were spaced at 1/4" with pieces of basswood from the hobby shop. The dowel system worked very well. I had to cut holes through the fiberglass and VDS before laminating too.


rubber vibration damping strips that go over the edges and some kevlar veil. Kevlar is very hard to cut so hopefully it will deflect some core shots in it's life.


Me fixing a leak in the bag. No pictures from the layup unfortunately.


My high tech heating system. Kmart heating blanket with a space blanket on top. Got it pretty warm inside, no idea how warm. Epoxy cures much faster and stronger with heat. The weights make sure that everything lays flat on the camber mold.



Out of the mold. Lots of flashing that needs to be trimmed.


Finished board. Cotton cloth graphics and a couple of carbon tows for show.

More pictures of the finished board in picasa. I'm mounting hardware now, hopefully take it out for a test ride tomorrow morning or this evening.

7 comments:

jesse parker said...

I like the paisley print..

Unknown said...

yeah, the fabric wasn't very opaque after it was wet with epoxy. All that's left is the print on it for the most part. White topsheets don't melt as much snow when it's below freezing.

Mike said...

The last time I saw someone laying up composites in that room, it ended with running down the hall and stairs of the building with a fire burning in the garbage can. Since there are no pictures like this in your album, I'll assume you didn't have the same problem.

Greg said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Greg said...

Loved your photos of this project. I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. Could you recommend any good references?

Hugo said...

nice heating system ehehe

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