How to Use Fiberglass to Give Strength to a Surfboard

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Kimo Greene and I am here to teach you how to shape a surfboard on behalf of Expert Village. I feel that the strength of the board is basically in the glass job, not in the blank. If you put three layers of glass on top of your surfboard, it should be pretty durable for years. That has been sort of like my benchmark. I get boards back that are ten years old, they still look good. Fiberglass is actually glass, if you take it and look at it, they melt it and make thread out of it and then they weave it together. Fiberglass itself is not strong by itself; it needs resin to make it stronger. Strength of the fiberglass is determined by how much resin will hold per ounce, this is six ounce fiberglass, it holds six ounces of resin in each one of these squares. So what we do is typically on a board like this we will put three layers of fiberglass on the deck, a patch right in here and there is three layers from here back, four layers on the rail, because you have a bottom lap that comes up. This is a little bit smaller weave, this is four ounce here, used for shorter boards and deck patches. What we will do typically is we will glass the bottom first; we will fold the glass over to the other side and then sand it and then blend the top layers to it. Then we put three layers over it. Now to make it smooth like this you have to coat it with different layers of resin, then you have to sand it between coats in order to get it shiny. That is where your strength comes in."