Hubble bubble boil and try not to get resin on my pants again!

Here is the latest from the Uglie Carnie Laborotries:
Nomex Honeycomb Prototype

I have had the chance to try using a new core called Nomex which is a kevlar honeycomb that is very light, very strong and when laminated correctly has amazing shear resistance. It has strange bending characteristics in that when bent one way it will naturally want to bend in the other way to create a compound curve (like a camber concave board). This proved to be a bit of a plane as i only wanted it to bend in one plain...

I wanted to make a shape i could compare it against so i decided to use my Little Mr bigwood speedboard template and slapped it down onto my w concave mold.

The core is one of the thickest i have ever made and it has a beefy 14mm tall wooden rail to protect it too. This has made this board very stiff with just a few mm of deflection under my 60kg. The flex it has seems to "bottom out" when bounced on. I will pass it around some bigger buddies soon but by the feel this board should be sweet for riders up to 100kg

The skins were made from a low temp prepreg with fibre running nose to tail and at angles that maximize the torsional stiffness of the board. The laminate was also balanced from skin to core as this leads to more even flex patterns. The laminate consisted of 20 different layers of carbon and glue film. It was cooked off at 65 degrees for 6 hours at 2 bars of pressure (and in a vac bag so that gives a total presure of 3 bar on the part). By using a high pressure and strategicly place glue film each cell drinks a little resin that forms tiny fillets on each all of the cell. This is what gives nomex its high shear resistance.

Some carbon peeking out past some grip

To be honest i was hoping for a much lighter board but the ply wood drunk up a lot of resin and made the total ungripped weight come in at just under 1.4kg. I think that this is actually an ok weight as the boards thick wood rails and nose and tail blocks (where most of the weight is distributed at the moment) make this board as robust as any wood board and would survive a crash or rail impact that would be detrimental to most carbon/cap construction boards . In the next board im going to move to solid carbon rails with only thin strips of wood in the rails, nose and tail. This should shave at least an other 500g off but would sacrifice some of the robustness that the ply wood brings to this board.

The other feature i wanted to try in this board is the carbon finger grip wrinkles that i formed before putting this board in the oven. I pulled up a small bunch of fibre along the rail line that would cure with a peel ply finish to give a much more tactile feel and added grip even with thick gloves on.

I also milled the truck holes and was stoked with how well aliened the front and back smoky baseplate sit. This board should be very calm at speed with such good aliment the front and back truck will be running true rather than fighting against each other.

More photos to come as soon as the shops open (so i can go get some longer kingpins and set this sucker up)