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So we are making a 9'6" long, 3" thick noserider for a guy in Los Angeles. He requested something unique and artsy so here we go: Octo blob!!

Tori designed the Octopus with colour pencils on ricepaper which I laminated into the board under the fiberglass.

After the board has been hotcoated and sanded. Tori carefully applied a blob of resin. We used UV-katalyst here instead of MEKP, so it would cure quick once we had our desired blob. We just took it out in the sun and the resin instantly cured. UV-resin is great in many ways. It gives you unlimited time while working with it and you can deside how quick you want it to go off and cure depending on how much light you use. We use sunlight but we have palmtrees, overcast etc. to work with. When laminting a board you don't want it to kick to soon because the resin will not have time to bond properly to the board and the lamination becomes less strong and more brittle i.e. cracks easy. In this case it did not matter so we applied full sunlight. UV-katalyst is also less harmgul to the envioronment as the resin gives off less VOC into the air while curing than with MEKP.

Tori painted the top board with acrylic red and the bottom 2/3rds with blue. We have a compressor and a paintgun to speed up the process.

We sanded the paint off the blob and then glosscoated the whole thing with finishing resin which is thinner than regular surfboard resin. We usually heat it up in the microwave first to get even thinner before applying it on the board. The glosscoat is sanded with 400grit up to 600 or even 1200. Then we polish it with a woolpad and surfboard polish agent. The polsiher we use has a maximum RPM of 2800 which is minnimum requirment.  Any questions about these kind of projects, please contact me at david@diplomatsurfboards.com