Finishing off the board

I used peel ply on the top surface of the board and because of its weave it leaves an imprint on the surface of the board that gives it a mat finish. It also obscures visibility of air bubbles in the resin which are pretty likely to be there.

The most common method seems to be to sand it back and apply another coat of resin to get the shiney finish.

A quick search on kiteforum.com turned up, as usual, some other great tips. Seems like the best results come from having the vac film directly against the surface of the board. An even better result can be achieved by placing 3-4mm plastic perpex over the top of that and then a second vac film over the top to smooth out the surface.

The risk of not using peel ply or perforated release film is that excess resin will be trapped under the film and the pools of resin will leave the surface lumpy and add unnecesary extra weight. I think this is what happened in my first board where I used ripstop nylon as peel ply. Appartently one way to mitigate this is to squeegee out the excess resin as the vacuum gets applied.

To finish this board off I decided to put a thin coat of resin on. I mixed up about 50 gm of resin and put it in the microwave for 2x15 seconds to thin it out. I then dabbed the resin with the end of a paint brush over the entire surface to get the resin into any air bubbles on the surface then vac bagged it. I put some rolled up rags around the outside of the board so as the vacuum increased the plasic was pulled tigh across the surface of the baord. At the same time I squeegeed as much of the trapped air away as I could while the vacuum increased.

A thin layer of resin and back under the vac film to get a shinny finish on the board.