Laminating cores

[skiingfreak]

First off, fantastic site… It’s breathing new life into the upcoming ski season for me.

Since I’ve already laminated one core and it didn’t turn out successfully, I’m looking for some advice on laminating up my next core. The problems I ran into were basically that the strips are uneven on the bottom of the core and that the core warped width wise. We’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and discussing how to solve these problems but wanted to get some opinions before I try my next core.

I got some advice that I should be using bar clamps and setting the strips on top of them to keep them flat on the base, we’ve also been thinking we need to just lay them flat on a table with painter’s plastic under the core and press the core down as we’re clamping together. What do people do to get the excess glue off and keep the strips flat as they’re laminating? We’re using strips of pine and hickory ripped to about ¾ x ½ inch strips glued together w/tight bond 3. Part of my concern is that we don’t have a planer or access to one as of right now and are planning on using a router to profile our cores. I’m worried that we’re going to end up with one side of our core that is not completely flat and it will cause some issues with our bases.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[shralpster]

Here are pics of our progress so far (Steve and I are working on these together)...
http://picasaweb.google.com/skiingfreak/SkiBuilding

[skiingfreak]

Has anyone tried to use a router to plane the bottoms of your cores? I'm thinking about making some flat rails for my profiler and placing the cores upside down and hitting them with the router in order to get a good starting point.
Is this something that others haven't really had to deal with?

[plywood]

i`m doing exactely what you described. the "bottom" of the woodcore doesn`t come out really flat and in my case is always covered with epoxy - so i flip the core and plan it with straight rails. works perfect.

[skiingfreak]

Awesome. Thanks for your response!

[hafte]

If you have a table saw you can stack laminate the boards instead of cutting the strips out first. Get wood that is planned on the two wide surfaces. Stack them as deep as you can cut with the saw and rip your ski core part from that and glue the two book matched part together to get the full width of the ski. Its covered here. http://www.skibuilders.com/howto/skicon ... tion.shtml

You end up with one center joint to match instead of 6-7.

Hope that makes sense

Hafte