Confessions of a Novice Shaper: #2 and #3, Part 2

Time for more pictures and shameless self-promotion of my amateur skills. These are some pics from the past few nights. I've been trying to finish the laminating/hotcoating phases of these two boards before I start sanding my #001 along with these two and making the place all dusty. It seems like groundhog day doing boards in batches like this, things get kind of repetitive, but I suppose its good practice. I sort of miss shaping right now though, I'm about ready to be done with the glassing portion of the program.

Cutting the glass for the deck, I believe there's already a second layer under there cut to the edge of the rail. I decided to do a free lap this time, since its a clear layer and it seemed pointless to do a cutlap that would just be clear.

Nice to have my digital camera instead of my crappy phone camera, makes the details pop...

Air bubbles/pockets...

Cleaning up my free-lap from the deck before the hotcoat. Small surform works well, but gets gummy and annoying.

Some more glass trimming. I found that it helped to turn the lights out on one side of the room which reduced glare on the cloth and allowed light from the other side of the room to shine through. This allowed me to easily see the edge of the board and judge how far/close I am when trimming...

Ok, so the ink from the logo does not like resin. Here (dunno if the picture shows it well) some of the color from the logo bled up toward the nose of the board as I squeegeed the resin along. Need to find a better way to print (currently using laser color printer on rice paper). Hmm...

Look, the board has acne. Actually, this is what happens when you mix your resin too vigorously and your hotcoat pour has too many bubbles in it...

Preparing to hotcoat the bottom, taping up to the edge of the deck hotcoat. The catalyzed lam/glass looks kinda like snake skin...

Hmm...bug. The hotcoat was already gelling , and I didn't want to mess with it, so I left him in there...

Previously, I was nervous about cutting into foam with a razor blade while doing my cutlaps. I didn't feel totally comfortable doing this either...cutting a big hole into my stringer/board...

Pretty painless actually, the jig made it very easy. Now ready to set the leash plug...

Excess resin gets sanded away...

Some random shots of the space. I always like seeing other peoples workspace for some reason, so here's mine. You can see the #001 in the background. Can't wait to sand those bamboo 101 fins, I only hope they'll look halfway as good as these.