Hello,

I am planning on doing an infusion of a 5’5” x 20” surfboard. The board itself is made out of xps foam. I plan on doing the whole thing at once. I’m a little worried about the foam twisting while under vacuum. I’m thinking my solution to this is to do a hand layup of carbon rails (basically just around the perimeter of the foam). In my mind this will prevent the foam from distorting while under vacuum.

The epoxy I’m using has a viscosity of 350 and a working life of 40 minutes. The working life is what I’m concerned about. My plan to combat this is to pull vacuum from the wide point on both rails. I will then have spiral tubing running the length of the board on the deck and bottom with a resin feed line in each. I have no idea if this is a good idea or not but with only 40 minutes working time, it makes sense to me.

As for the lay up, it’s an xps foam core followed by 4 oz E cloth fiberglass, 2mm lantor soric lrc, 4 oz E cloth, peel ply, then bag. There will be spots along the rails were there is no soric, these spots will have flow mesh on top of the peel ply. I made a diagram of what I’m planning.

This will be my first go with infusion. Am I on the right track or will my ideas not work? Any input is more than welcome.

Thanks.

I went through with the infusion. I made some mistakes and learned a lot. I was having trouble getting the bag to seal with my vacuum line along the rails, so I put it on where my second resin line was going to be. I ended up with spiral tubing running the length of the top as the resin line, and spiral tubing running the length of the bottom as the vacuum line. Resin and vacuum ports were centered on these lines. What ended up happening was I basically had a freeway of epoxy from my inlet to the vacuum line. Epoxy reaches the vacuum line well before the board was fully infused. This caused me to waste quite a bit of epoxy as I had to mix and add more several times. The other problem i ran into, I used hardware store T fittings for my vacuum and infusion line...they were hard plastic and did compress the foam a little underneath them. The spiral tubing did not compress it much at all. I still have to finish sand the board, but I’m already planning my next one. I may use coremat and flow mesh instead of soric, or maybe even innegra. I’m just messing around with different composites for surfboards trying to find one that’s a winner.