pressure dents in new boards!

[lostman]

I recently bought a new board and after only surfing it three times has all sorts of dents.

[Scotty H]

I've had this problem too. I bought a new board a couple of months ago and where my knee goes in for the duck-dive the deck dented so badly that the glass has cracked there.

I'm taking it back and talking to the shaper but I guess I'll end up paying for it to be fixed. This is my 8th new board and I've never had it happen before.

Could there have been a dud batch of blanks come out or is it a sign of bad glassing? Any shapers comments?

[Dicco]

You probably have a board thats been glassed , or both shaped and glassed, "offshore " if so it would be glassed using low cost low quality polyester resin and glass sourced from China or India . I bought some of these resins and glass in from "offshore " and the resin was a lot softer than usual but still brittle and the glass was more like 3oz than th 4 oz it was supposed to be.With thinner glass cloth and lousy resin you could expect dents easily. Paying top price for a board garrrantees nothing these days !!
dicco

[Cactus2099]

I've had similar problems over the years with mass produced, "brand name" boards.

Getting customs made by reputable local shapers seems to have reduced the problem, but the lighter materials being used these days compared to previous means that durability invariably has to suffer.

[WANDERER]

Taking heaps of foam off the deck will also mean more dings, the outer most part of the blank is usually the hardest and densest, if the shaper takes a lot off the deck then youll find that the board will ding more easily.
I've recently had a mal made and the glass job was 2x 10oz, so imagine my surprise when i cleaned the wax off the first time and found all these pressure dings. In this case i reckon it was not enuff curing time, but even then the foam under the glass must be pretty soft to ding that easily.

watching your favourite board disintergrate before your eyes is just another part of life, along with dog customs and stolen wetties... unfortunately.

[craig]

i dinged and snapped a lot of boards this last 12 months...... not thru any fantastic surfing but just things like going over the falls with em, landing to hard and things like that.
after the 5th i'd had enough and went and got a webber tuflite from wicks at collaroy thinking it would last forever..... a month later i snapped that too.
i thought there was no way they would replace it but i tried anyway and the bloke there was super helpful and believe it or not rang me back a few days later and said there was a brand newy sitting there waiting for me. (apparently webber gave the all clear to replace it,not wicks, so dont hold me to this snap guarantee...)

sorry bout the blatant plug but wicks deserves one, needless to say i buy all my hardware there now.

so, ditch your inferior glassed boards and get a tuflite. mine has been surfed almost every day and has lived in the back of my car for the last 6 months, without a cover and has about 3 very small dings but otherwise as good as the day i got it. and no pressure dings.
it may be made in thailand but its gonna outlast any other board iv'e ever owned.......
any body got anything bad to say about tuflites?.... other than 'its putting our shapers out of business'

[WANDERER]

any body got anything bad to say about tuflites?.... other than 'its putting our shapers out of business'

some of their boards are too light, all of the shaping advances and techniques have been developed on traditionally built boards, to just transfer these shapes into a significantly lighter material will not always work. I don't know if its possible to get the dimensions customized on a tuflite, but if i was gonna get a tufflite mal, I'd probably get the board made 1/4 of an inch thinner than i would a traditionally built board, to try and get the weight versus bouyancy ratio right. I don't know how much this applies to shortboards, but for mals IMO "no weight = no momentum"

oh yeah... and their putting local shapers out of business.

for interest sake, i reckon the BIC boards have a better wieght for longboards than the Tufflite.

[Dicco]

The tuflite boards should be dent resitant ! The sandwich construction technique where you have 2 layers of glass separated by 3mm of PVC foam gives a huge increase in surface stiffness and thus resistance to denting . Like somewhere between 30 to 40 times the stiffness of two layers of glass with just laid one on top of the other .Trouble is that when you do really ding a tuflite or get a fin chop youi haveto get it repaired well using epoxy by some one that really knows what their doing...
As for Tuflite putting local shapers out of business your right but so are well known brands by getting boards made off shore for peanuts then still charging the same price,

[Dicco]

Im sure you have seen a tuflite pop - their not indistructbile but are sure more ding /dent resistant than your ordinary polyester board . As for getting a custom tuflite board theres just no way as far as i can see - Tuflite are into volume production and a custom shape would require new moulds - both for the core and for the sandwich. As for weight it seems that Tuflite aimed to get the boards as light as possible which seems to be the go for short boards ,but then i hear guys saying their too light ...
Of course you could always go to a glasser and get a shitload of gloss coat put on the thing and get the weight up ... but then you would have to use epoxy or 2 pack urethane clear, otherwise the coat would be as fragile as hell.
What we meed here in oZ is someone to develop a glassing system like Tuflite that can be applied to any shape.Someone of course that doesnt want a fortune to glass it this way .... :

[betterIwas]

Reading US design message boards, it seems some shapers/glassers are using epoxy on custom boards. Extra cost appears to be about US$100. Do not know if any local boardmakers are using the technology

[mad]

Shaper mate of mine glassed me an epoxy board quite a few years ago and pretty much swore off it immediately because of the extra work and rooting around involved. E.g the sanding takes heaps longer because the epoxy is that much stronger, and this eats into their meagre profit margins. Still got the board and the glass job is still hanging in there.
I agree with the suss blank = depressions thinking and unfortunately you can't tell unless your involved with your board from day one, and trust your shaper to order the blank you want.

[Dicco]

Me thinks that epoxy will dent just as easy as polyester if it is the same thickness, using the same glass cloth, as it is no stiffer than polyester
The thing is , unless its a bad quality epoxy , it shouldnt crack as easily if dented .Like you get a poly board and give it a whack - you usually get a dent with the resin cracked /broken ,whereas with an epoxy board you get a dent with (usually ) no cracking .Thast because epoxies stretch a lot more before breaking and they are far,far better adhesives than polyesters so the resin sticks with the glass much better .A polyester will break at around 1% extension while a good epoxy will go at around 7 % .extension
Theres a guy in the US making boards using clear polyurethane as resin and hes claiming to make a really tough board .... Trouble is that the resin has to be cured at around 70 C and so he must have a lot of cores developing sinks...