not exactly sure why but i think the most common curing temp for ski/board building is 170-200 degrees.

I'm OK with the 120 to 125F range because it's still better than where I'm at now (room temp in a basement).

...don't let the water heat to anywhere near boiling. What started out safer than a pnuematic press would then become much more dangerous... Very good point. Letting the water get anywhere near boiling (212F) would be nuts but a temp rage between 120-125F (home water heater range) seems like it wou...

What if you had the water heater on in advance an used a valve to fill the bladders after layup? You could then close the valve to apply pressure. Not sure how quickly this could happen so it might be risky. I think I might try closed system with a mini tankless water heater and a water pump to circ...

Schoeckl this is brilliant! I think I'm going to give this a try. With a little plumbing and heating tweaks you can probably have a heated water press for less than the cost of a heat blanket.

Paul,

I might be able to help you out now and then. Shoot me an email (dante@boardcrafter.com) and we'll work out the details.

Dante

plywood: "i did it!"

Wow Plywood! That was pretty innovative. I hadn't seen that thread before. Are you still using that method? I wonder how Kevlar fabric might work.

This is a vacuum mold. Under a bladder press it would get obliterated for a lot of reasons (e.g. only 4 mold ribs, wood spine). As for the flexibility of Polycarbonate I’m convinced you can get a far tighter tip and tail radius than you would ever want for a snowboard or skis. If you have a plastics...

I went down the Acrilic road before this and it broke before I could get anything pressed ($70 down the tubes). Before that I had a sheet metal surface but I ran into issues with deformation of the surface. It was not easy to see where the sheet metal was not conforming properly to the mold shape an...

I am in the process of re-designing my mold, and want to make it adjustable. Looking at some of the pictures here, as well as some preliminary designing, leads me to wonder about the camber. As the length of the ski is increased, is the caber also increasing? If not, how are you working around such...

I’ve received a few questions about this functionality since my last post. So I put this little video together to show how it works. This example uses a regular printer on standard sized letter paper but if you have access to a wide format dot matrix printer or a plotter you would not need to piece ...

Hey Hadley, I did a search for pleats and vacuum bagging techniques. Mary results came up related to canoe building. It looks like the technique is to have points along your tape ring where you vertically place a piece of the tape to create a sealed fold to give a larger work piece (like a canoe) en...

I was picturing folds in the vacuum film not pieces of sealant tape. I’d like to see what you mean. Please post a picture if you can… maybe I can learn a new trick.

Pleats? …If you mean what I’m picturing that would be a bad idea. You do want a little bit of slack over your board/skis, so the vac film can really pinch down, but you don’t want any folds or wrinkles whatsoever over the vacuum sealant tape –they become little tunnels for air to creep in. Here is h...

You can get an old roll fed dot matrix printer from a used PC store for under $50 to get all the single sheet prints you could want. You can also print on a regular printer with regular sized paper. If you do this I recommend selecting the cut guidelines option so you can be sure you are not losing ...

Thanks for checking that out!

It’s good to hear that it works using crossover. Hopefully it works with the Mac version too.

If someone has a Mac and is willing to buy Crossover and post whether or not it works I’d be happy to shoot you a key for your trouble. PM me if you’re interested.