Building on my experimentation with sidewall, I wanted to try a poured epoxy sidewall method as seen on skibuilders.com. A buddy working as a CNC operator at a startup let me come play around with heavy machinery for this one!
The idea is to cut a trench out of your wood core stock, in the shape of your board. Pour epoxy into that trench. When cured, plane down the whole thing and profile the thickness. This method, in my humble opinion, yields a great result and is less of a pain than bonding plastic sidewalls onto your already profiled core. Granted, a lot of things become easier when you get a robot to do the work for you!
Gluing up the stock.Rough planing on a large belt sander.Large scale CNC router, this thing was really cool.Precision stock planing on the router.Creating the sidewall trench tool-path.Cutting the trench!Filling it with epoxy sidewall material. They guy from West System up-sold me on the pre-thickened product when I called……in hindsight the un-thickened, less viscous variant would’ve been ideal. This worked, but left me with some bubbles in the sidewall.Another planing operation after the epoxy cured.Drilled insert holes.Countersunk for inserts.Relief trench to make room for the steel edge teeth (hard to see here)The moment we’ve all been waiting for, the final planing and core profiling operation.It was really fun to watch the sidewall emerge.Final core profiling complete!Chopped off the extra stock and this core is ready for layup.R&D
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