Kleb's Custom Board Building: Finishing

Sanding

• Wearing a respirator and a tyvex suit, sand the entire board with 50-60 grit sand paper. Take care to not cut through the topmost glass layer. I used a 6" orbital palm sander with 60 grit for the bottom and top deck, and hand-sanded the rails, tail, and nose with a sanding block.
• Take care along any hard rails to keep them as such.
• If you need to cast sharp rails for the rear of a wave board or a slalom board do so now. Turn the board bottom-up, make a tape dam along the edges to be cast and fill with epoxy.

Gloss Coat

• Clean the shop and vacuum all the dust off the surface.
• Tape off the edges of the top deck, marking the area for the non-skid and/or deck pads. Flip the board over, wipe the surface with a clean towel damp with acetone, and coat the bottom and rails with about a pint of epoxy, letting the excess fall to the floor. This serves as your gloss coat.
• Before the epoxy is dry, peal off the tape along the top deck so that you do not get a really sharp edge.

Polishing

• Wet-sand the rails and bottom with 320 grit, 400 grit, and finally 600 grit.
• Polish the bottom and rails following the instructions of the polishing compound that you are using.

  

• Apply a couple coats of wax

Non-skid

• Flip the board over and mask off the rails so that any epoxy will run off on to the floor.
• Also mask off the areas where the deck pads will go if you are using them.

  

• Wipe the remaining exposed areas with acetone to remove any wax contamination.
• Mix about a half a pint of epoxy and apply a light coat to the board
• Carefully sprinkle sugar over the wet epoxy so that it just dulls the surface.

  

• As with the gloss coat above, remove the masking tape just after the epoxy starts to gel.

Detailing

• Use a small router or a utility knife coupled with a hair drier to remove the glass from the fin and mast boxes.

  

  You may want to tape off the surrounding areas so that if you slip, you won't scrape your nice polished or textured surfaces. Also be carefull to not delaminate the glass from the top of the boxes.
• Using a dull drill bit (or one specially sharpened for cutting plastics), drill out your footstrap insert holes.
• Using a small file or a camfering bit on a small router, camfer the edges of the box openings so that nothing can catch on the edges of the glass and cause delaminiation.

   

• Using a countersink bit or a large drill bit, countersink the footstrap holes.

Accesorize

• If you are installing deck pads that will cover the footstrap screw holes, prepare a template before installing the pad.
• Install the pad, find the holes with some straight pins and then and use a soldering iron to make nice clean holes through the deck.

  

• Install the footstraps with stainless steel screws and large-area washers. Remember, using a single screw for attaching each end of the footstrap is just asking for trouble since two points define a line, not one.