Glassing:

If you've never worked with fiberglass before you are definately going to want to buy the video "Glassing 101" by John Carper from Fiberglass Supply. I've done quite a bit of fiberglass repair on boats in my time and the video was still helpful.

Anyhow, here's whats involved. Roll out your glass over the board and get some really sharp scissors and cut the glass to the shape of the board, allowing extra aournd the board to overlap the other side about an inch. If you have corners in the tail or a point in the nose, you'll probably have to cut out a V into the glass to get it to lay down flat without wrinkling. Put on your gloves and resperator, then pour out about a quart of resin into a pail and measure out your MEKP in another container. Take a deep breath, get yourself psyched and mix the two together. Now you are in a race against time, pour out some of the mixture on the glass on the blank and smooth out as much as you can with the squeegee. Make sure that everything is wet with the resin mix, especially the part that you are going to overlap onto the other side. Next, roll the overlap part over, either with your hand or the squeegee, smooth onto the other side. There you go, you just put a layer on! Now walk around the board while the resin mix sets up and smooth out any runs on the bottom side, this will save you a lot of trouble later.

After you do your glass layers, put one more layer of just the resin mix over the whole board. Mix in the correct amount of Surface Agent in this coat. The Surface Agent has wax in it which seals out the air allowing the resin to fully cure so that its not tacky. This gives you something to sand smooth later.

Important things you need to know:

• The reason that it's a race against time is that, depending on the ambient temperature, the resin mix can turn into a gel really quickly. It was a little under 80 degrees when I made my longboard and even using half the recommended amout of MEKP I really had to rush to get everything wet before the mix gelled.
• When in doubt, use less MEKP. It will take longer to set up enough for the next layer, but that's much better than having your overlaps pealing up or an half wetted out layer. Also, the less MEKP you use the stronger the glass will be! I did one layer a day to make sure that it was hard before the next.
• MEKP is nasty stuff, don't get any on your skin!
• Do this outside in a garage if possible, I did it in my basement and my house stunk like resin for a week. It was making me sick, I stayed at my brother's house for a few days.
• The number of layers is up to you, standard is one on the bottom and two on top. I did two and two thirds on the top and one and a patch in the middle on the bottom and its still not too heavy and will last a lot longer.
• A cool thing to do is make your own logo for the board. Fiberglass supply sells rice paper which, with a lot care and few tries, can be run through a laser printer or copier. Put this under your last layer of glass.