Hey, your making a whole board from scratch but you dont have the motivation to paint it 4 times???

If the stuff you used the first time worked use that! Why risk it?

Best of luck, post some pics when its done.

I'd stick with the brush.
Fitzy recommends "water based urethane", it's easy to get a very smooth finish.
The last ply board I made I used some gloss polyurethane I had in the shed. I got some granite laminex from one of the local kitchen makers, it made a nice shiny bottom, maybe a bit heavy and unneccessary though.
It was a pretty crap board, but made a nice coffee table!
It's most important to seal the edges of the ply. That's where it will soak up water.

maybe try some of the 'upmarket' ocean racing yacht builders for a good compound,i.e kevlar,carbon graphite resins? Bo.

paint it
watyl solargaurd

my ply board is drying from its first coat of Solver Polyurethane outdoor gloss right now in the shed. it's basically a polyurethane varnish, does the job brilliantly. recommend 6 coats though.

i used regular 12mm ply - just right. my board is 132 x 38 with some rocker (soak the whole board in a bathtub of water overnight, then bend it into shape and dry for 2-3 days)

a couple of very small surfboard fins cut down are screwed/epoxied into the heelside of the board - viola! the bindings and pads are the most expensive part - $30 for the pads and $21 for the bindings, but i bought DaKine and Cabrinha stuff respectively. you could get 2nd hand stuff cheap as.

looks to be a nice board :)

Awesome, least now I have a few different names for products I can use, will check them out.... I'm sure whatever is used for your helmet cRAZY would be WAY too tough for a board, it'll like repel the water before the board even get's close to it yeah?!

Thanks for the tip Neill on soaking it in the bathtub, last time I used a piece of strapping and wound it to the bench, then ironed the hell out of it while wet, kinda worked, but soaking it fully would do the trick!

Cheers.

i'll post up some pics of mine (hoping it will be done for saturday when there's a bit of a breeze coming!) on the weekend for you guys, it's a pretty simple design but i think it will work quite well. painted another layer of poly on this morning, should have 5 coats done on saturday. unsure if this is enough - will wait and see.

i got some SUPER cheap and ****house quality surfboard fins, cut the top off them (removed the bit where they slot into the boards) and drilled two holes into the top of them. then i used a sharp chisel to gouge out the foil shape through two layers of the 5-layer ply. so the fin sits recessed in 2/5ths of the way into the ply, and it's screwed in with two stainless screws and resinned into place which basically creates an extremely solid block around the root of the fin.

it was strong enough with just the two screws, with the resin (tomorrow afternoon) as well it will be ridiculously strong.

hoping to get out on the water on saturday or sunday with it, first time out so could be interesting. hope it's waterproof enough - ideally it should have another 2 coats but i can't wait that long while the wind stays good.

Looks good! but maybe the fins are to far from the end???