spent the last 2 days sanding, routing, sanding and laminating ... after so many people had such impressive results with vaccum bagging I started gathering equipment a while ago and last week I finally got my pump which was the last part. pony ready to go!!
since the tesseract is my bread and butter board, on the one hand cause its simply superfun (although a tiny bit too stiff), on the other hand cause its one of the most stealthy boards I got (good against german police), I decided to start experimenting on it! --- kinda hurt a lot to dig into the deck though!
/pictureattack
anyway, I started with a lot of sanding ... boy, this cork finish is sturdy

I kept sanding until I removed the w-concave pretty much - ultimately I wanted to get a flat surface for the battery and that meant to get rid of the W and to dig into the board to remove the really strong rocker:
for the rocker, I lent a handheld router thingie and thought a while how move along ... finally I measured the rocker profile and digged the into the right areas for the right amount, basically in 1mm step functions:
then I took rough sanding paper and spend a while smoothing the steps. ruler check: heureka, its FLAT!!
didnt dare to dig in deeper, did a short flex check and with the cork gone and about 5mm off in the middle of the board, it is already slightly too flexy. fingers crossed for "getting it right" with 1 carbon layer & carbon enclosure.
ontop of the flat and slightly inserted enclosure, I wanted to hide the motor wires under the carbon layer. here you see the 3 cables, shrink tubed to a compact package:
router gogogo:
smoothing entry and exit of the channel:
jup, motor wires fit right in!
now comes the part where I really spent a while thinking about: how to laminate over the wire channel without destroying it, also I wanted a real channel and not permanently fixated wires laminated right in (which wouldve been visible probably ... also I didnt know how to handle the exit wires under the vaccum. anyway, I spend nearly a 1hour dog walk on that until I had a cool idea (for some it might be obvious or trivial, I felt pretty smart in that moment :lol: ): I had a polystyrol plate in my garage and I knew acetone can dissolve it - so I cut a polystyrol insert for the channel:
sanded it down to board level:
used some filler to make it really smooth an invisible after vaccum bagging one layer of carbon (I also closed all holes that I didnt need anymore)
and now I really REALLY hope that my plan works: laminate carbon, vaccum bag, when its cured, use acetone to dissolve the polystyrol insert to have a free channel for my wires. *fingerscrossed*
from here on I went standard laminating procedure. some slow curing resin on top of the clean board:
CARBON!!!! 3K 200g/m^2 air grade carbon sheets with air grade resin. after curing 24h there is a tempering @ 60°C for 15h step for heavily increased structural stability well beyond what typical carbon/resin combinations achieve. ill do the tempering in the sauna of my parents :lol:
now the vaccum bag magic - release layer with small holes for excess resin, a bleeder layer to soak up excess resin which at the same time is also the breather layer (so the vaccum pump can actually suck the air from all parts of the ba)g, finally a bag enclosing all of the board which I closed up with some tacky tape.
vacuum GOGOGO! a pretty exciting moment, since I wasnt sure if I had leaks or not:
i was very generous with the bleeder/breather layer - very thick material, folded for double thickness, under pump hose even quadruple thickness so that every part of the board will be reached by the pump:
my pump is quite small, but high quality and very silent. I got it running in the room next to me and I cant hear it at all! tomorrow around this time Ill hopefully have as beautiful results as okp!
more updates probably tomorrow! fingers crossed for the motor wire channel
