Sweets round two!

german chocolate cake!

Sweets, round one!!!!

shirtless cupcakes
peanut butter surprise inside!
beautiful cupcakes
beautiful cook!

Birthday sweets here we come! Mel made chocolate peanut butter surprise cupcakes last night. Best cupcakes i've ever had!

sanding down fins

makin progress..

SF with TA! yes!

she's in heaven, once again

at oldest organic strawberry farm in CA. Got apple strawberry cider and a scone with olallieberry jam on top! best scone ever. "try one of these scones, you're gonna love em!"

windy coast - just north of santa cruz on our way back

got some pisco sour at some uppity bar in haight ashbury

snagged some vegan empanadas from this chilean place tony came across. she's in heaven

met up late night Friday
video with Tony!


went up to SF this past weekend to meet up with Tony! so much fun. video above, and pics too, although i appartenly didn't take as many pictures as i thought...

glassed on fins

then put in the fin rope at the base, and then a full piece of cloth on both sides of the fin, extending onto the board by about 2 inches, and then a smaller oval piece of cloth that went up the fin about two inches and down onto the board about two inches. as you can tell, it'll take a lot of cleaning up/sanding to get these looking remotely good...

rear end

more dimensions than you think here in setting them. back ends of fins are 7 1/4" from the back tips fo the board, back ends of fins are 1.25" from the rail. the front end of the fins are toe'd in 1/4", adn the fins are at canted at 4 degrees. set them in place with a bit of resin on the bottom and taped them securely there to dry for about an hour or so

glassed on my fins last night. once again, somethign that didn't seem that hard, ended up being hard. or just more time consuming than i thought, but oh well. it was also a bit trickier, but they turned out good, i'll just have to sand down the edges and stuff a bit.

teammates!

finished glassing top! holy cow so pumped!
hell why not two pics!
putting on two layers of cloth for the topside of the board

so over the past couple of days i have been sanding down my mistakes from glassing the bottom fo the board. got some feedback from guys on a forum and at a shop, and it sounded like i just had to make the best of it. so last night i finished up sanding the edges down to what was actually glassed to the board correctly. woke up early this morning and prepped everything, while mel made breakfast. then WE glassed. yes, mel helped and seriously did awesome. she worked on the white end while i did the green and end where they meet, then i touched up wrapping the rails all around. seriously, i barely told mel what to do and she just watched what i was doing and went for it and did it so good!#@ i'm so pumped right now. the resin didn't gel too quick and actually started gelling at about 35 minutes, which is almost dead on the preferable 30 minute gel time. so as a note, even when the room was at 62 ish degrees, i added 1% catalyst (not 1.5% as i did last time) and it worked out awesome. one thing i did try that you can see in teh video is that after i poured out the resin towards the edges, i flipped up teh edge of the cloth to try to soak up teh excess that way, and uniformly get it on the edge of the cloth. i had read this is how many guys do it and it works well. i tried it on one rail and it didn't seem to help. i think the bottom layer of thecloth got snagged on the top layer as i flipped it back down and it took a second to fix. there are also two small wrinkles on that rail now too, which can be sanded a bit to make them smooth, but i think its because i tried that method on that rail. don't think i'll try that way again really. also, there were a few shiny spots on my end (mel's end was perfect), which basically mean a bit of extra resin is on there, but it's minimal, adn not a big deal. something else to learn from though. my hand was shaking a few times as we went, but i think mel was just having fun- kept saying it was like spreading icing on a cake. so yea, this time, it went off without a hitch. plenty of time to wrap the rails cleanly and deal with the corners. i love melissa maher. pumped.

glassing... and screwing up...

really messup up wrapping of the rails. gonna be messy to clean up...

another view of the mistake! eeee
two containers at top of pic show how much resin got waisted by added too much catalyst. i've read many other posts now of guys doing this and have found tips on preventing this. actually i'm psyched to do the top layer now that i have some experience and further knowledge on how to do this.
finished bottom. like i said, i like how the flat part (other than the rails) turned out adn i really like the colors
shaping shack. sorry melissa...not sure how you put up with this
mixing color!
cloth ready to get glassed on!
list of what to do. make lists. they help, but they don't prevent certain disasters still...
glassed the bottom of the board yesterday... i was super nervous, but excited. mixed up the colors and added a bit extra catalyst bc it was 68 in our apt and not 78, which i'd read is the ideal temp. well, turns out i added a bit too much catalyst and it started gelling after about 10 to 15 minutes (who knows i was panicing and trying to do it all as fast as possible, but neatly), and ideally you want it to start gelling in 30 minutes. anyways, i got the flat glassed nicely, but when i went ot get more resin out of the container to start wraping hte rails, it was already gelling. the resin on the cloth wasn't yet as it was spread out- i visually saw how resin will gel quicker when in a large volume, rather than when spread out in smaller volume- a unique property of it. so i mixed up some other resin i had set aside in case this did happen and tried to frantically wrap the cloth everywhere. i think every curse word was said in the this process, whether it was said in my head, under my breath, out load and really out loud. i was seriously panicking and sweating at this point. everything was getting sticky adn harder to work with by the second. in one of my extra panic batches of resin i mixed up i added way too much resin hastily and saw that in fact, resin can start smokign if you add too much catalyst. when i got around to the tail end, the white cloth, it was pretty ugly. i did my best and got whatever i could wrapped as well as possible. i'll have to put alot mroe effort into it to clean it up. I posted pics and my scenario on a diy shaper site to get some feedback on what to do next and how to make the best of it. in my main tutorial i'm using in doing this process, it states "probably the worst thing that can happen is for hte resin to start gelling as you wrap the rails". well then, i experienced the worst thing that can happen, adn i'll deal with it. can't get any worse right? hope so.
on a high note, i like how the colors turned out adn blending them went smoother than expected also.