Stacking cassettes

[surfercory]

Hey Gang,

I am kinda new here, been doing a lot of reading and love the site! I hang and contribute to a simular site for my surfboards. Great to hang w fellow builders...
Cant seem to find much with search function though.

Anyways....wondering if anyone has tried or posted about stacking a few cassettes into the press and pressing 2 or 3 boards at once.
I know they do skateboards like this, would this work and would you lose camber incrementally each successive layer or would they all be the same?

Building a heated press in my shop, ordering materials, and gearing up for the fun!

Cory

[falls]

you could do it, but the shape of the core taper will govern what the base of the next board up will be shaped like.
I think that base flatness would suffer and your registration between layers would have to be spot on.
The big manufacturers don't seem to press snowboards like this so I don't think it would go that well.

One option is to build a double bay press - so one press cavity on top of another so you can press 2 at once.
Your other major thing is that unless there are two of you laying up it would prob be hard to layup 2,3, 4 + boards all in the space of one epoxy pot life.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it would work (unless you made milled aluminium molds so each board effectively went in as a rectangle prism block and the next block went in above and then pressure was applied from the top)

[skidesmond]

I agree w/ falls. Not sure this would work for skis/boards. I mean, you could do it it but the layering effect would not give you boards that are all the same. I have seen double presses on the internet.

[surfercory]

ya...I forgot about the tapered thickness of the core material effecting the base of the board above. Got to love innovative ideas though...sometimes they work!

Thanks for the reply guys

Cory

[Brazen]

I guess it could be done. You would have to add shim width in the aluminum at tip and tail in varying thickness until your last set and the materials would always have to be the EXACT same width, height and length. Wow. It would have to be an incredibly popular board to ever even approach that, right?

[riich]

I wouldn't do it. I worked for a board manufacturer in the '90s. Our night shift guys tried to mass produce by stacking two or three cassettes in a mold at a time. Almost every single board produced on our night shift came back as a warranty delam. Boards were getting puck marks in the bases and epoxy was getting in to places it shouldn't have been. We had many 'seconds' produced (boards you can't sell in a retail environment). Pressure wasn't distributed evenly and cassettes wouldn't line up with each other properly. Our Presses were converted European ski presses with hydraulic rams, concrete molds, cat tracks, fire hoses, heating system and had custom machined/ paired stainless steel cassettes. I was not privy to management business at the time but I'm sure the warranty returns were a major reason our extremely reputable company ended up being sold. The financial loss was huge. Every board you ruin costs two boards.
If you can design your molds and cassettes to stack there is a slim chance you could do it but it seems like a huge amount of work to get the precision necessary to get your pressure distributed through multiple cassettes with varying glue thicknesses and the possibility of shifting materials.
I think you will end up wasting a lot time and money on wasted materials.

[strangesnowboarding]

been done in skate production for years and years.

two problems already discussed, the profile shape changes with each tier so all the boards are essentially different. mega bad problem.

also as you increase layers you increase resistance, so you need way more pressure in order to get a nice press out of the snowboard.
theres a youtube video on this exact topic (big industry cutting corners that the standard american consumer cant see) video is sweet for a ton of different reasons too.


skateboards are now manafactured in stacks, all the boards come out the same.

mold (original top)
material
mold (2 sided cnc steel)
material
mold (2 sided cnc steel)
material
mold (original bottom)

with gargantuan rams to press the materials flat.

i cant imagine the size of the layup space that would feed 4+ snowboards into one press at a time.