Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Schneider SurfBoards: Stuki model wood lam... nice!

Here's a board my friend Stuki's been getting super stoked on. This one's a 10'0 x 30" x 4.25" wood laminated Schneider Surfboards nose rider.



The wood lamination thing is a trip. The guys who do it use a big plastic bag that covers the whole shaped blank. The bag is then sealed and attached to an evacuation pump. The whole contraption is a called a vacuum bag because you suck the air out of the plastic bag creating a "hole" in the atmosphere that's called a vacuum.



If you create a vacuum,
the atmosphere will press against it (at about 16lbs per square inch!) equally from all sides, across the entire surface, creating a perfect, form fitting, compressive sleeve.



If you were going to use the vacuum bag to laminate a wood veneer onto a blank you'd place the veneer over the blank before evacuating the air from the bag. The atmospheric pressure pushing against the bag presses the veneer of wood onto the shaped foam core. The result is a foam core with a perfectly pressed wood veneer wrapped around it. Vacuum bags are such cool pieces of equipment. I frickin' love applied science.

Stuki should be back from his cross country paddle trip in the next couple of weeks... I'll try to squeeze a review out of him.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

beautiful board. can't wait to hear how it does its intended job as a noserider. care to mention how much a baby like this costs?

John Ashley said...

I thought it was cool too! I'll get a report from Stuki and post it when he get's back from his tour of western lakes, rivers and pubs.

Anonymous said...

wow this is beautiful! im shaping my own SUP blank right now i would love to learn how to do this!