Preparing the ash strips for the core (in part 1 of the build) was time-consuming and wasn’t the quantum leap forward in the snowboard build that Charlie was hoping for. But taking those strips and glueing them together would give us some very tangible… the core!!
Deciding what glue to use was the first challenge and it was local joiner of many talents, Mark Fletcher, who suggested using Cascamite. This is a water-based resin glue that’s easy to use, with a reasonably long cure time that would give us time to work on the strips. We did a test first to see how this worked and, although we probably mixed the glue up to thinly, the bind between the strips was really good.
The second decision was how to tie the strips together securely, which we solved with bricklayer F Clamps – just £22 for ten on eBay. The next challenge was how to tie the strips together without them all popping up all over the place, and we solved this by clamping the strips between lengths of wood.
We applied the glue to one side of each strip by standing them on their sides and, with some great teamwork, applied and smoothed the Cascamite onto each strip.
The final set was to put the strip onto their flat edges, clamp them between lengths of wood and then use the F-clamps to pull them together.
So far so good, it’ll take a day for the Cascamite to cure properly as the air temperature is dropping… let’s see what happens tomorrow.
