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Anyone know where I could locate cork for use as a deck pad on a paipo?

check flooring stores they put it under flooring to soft it when you walk on it also talk to poobah aka larry he the cork guy. he gave me some sheets 3x2 feet by 1/2" thick you can have one if you can get down this way some time

Most good lumber yards carry sheet cork.

Thanks Mike. maybe... I may be close to you for the next NSSA kneeboard contest( my friend is in it). I think it is in SD county in a couple weeks. How does cork do for deck material? Will it last a year? What kinda glue would I use to stick it to the deck? If I can find some nearby I will grab it. It is for a board I am building for my brother in law. I used a jacobean stain on it and I think cork would look nice on it in place of a foam type deck material.

Cork makes a great deck, no wax needed.
Stick it down with the best stinky old school contact adhesive you can find.
I'm partial to Barge Cement.

is there any particular type of cork I should get? Mayan Lumbar in Oxnard can get it and its 1/4" thick and 4' wide, sold by the foot. Im guessin' 18"x4' should get 2 boards skinned. I dont know if its light or dark or course or smooth.

The lumber yard stuff is typically a nice nutty brown color and fairly smooth but somewhat absorbant.
After sticking it down and riding the board a few times I put a coat of the glue over the top to keep it from soaking up so much water.
This is sometime after a surf and before I put the glue on the top and you can see at the tail where the cork is still damp.

How do you like the cork deck compared to old fashioned surfboard wax?

It's comfortable and works very well; especially after the topcoat of contact cement.
I currently have it only on this plywood board, to give a bit of flotation but I like cork, in fact we have cork flooring and a cork desk top in our home office.
I'm interested in doing more with cork; I like cork's versatility and the renewability.
FWIW
There's a neat little book appropriately named "Cork Boat" about a guy who actually made a boat out of wine corks and sailed it down a river in Portugal.

I would so love a cork boat if the corks came from fine bottles of wine that I got to drink!

I Think my elbows would like a nice bit of cork to rest on, thanks for the info!

How long to dry without a glue coat?

Hard to say, at least a day; the main reason I added the glue topcoat was the extra weight of the absorbed water made the board too heavy.
It probably will depend on the density of the cork used. Some is very dense and not too absorbant but the stuff I had sucked up a lot of water.
Your mileage may vary.

Uncle Grumpy wrote:Hard to say, at least a day; the main reason I added the glue topcoat was the extra weight of the absorbed water made the board too heavy.
It probably will depend on the density of the cork used. Some is very dense and not too absorbant but the stuff I had sucked up a lot of water.
Your mileage may vary.

What thickness did you use?

The dark stained board is for my Brother-in-law. That is the one I was thinking of doing cork. I did place the black pad on it to see what it would look like before I skinned the Indigo board and I think it looked just fine.

http://i1191.photobucket.com/albums/z47 ... 000169.jpg


The tail in the dark board looks asymmetrical..its not same as indigo board but square tail.

I posted some photos of a board with a cork deck here - http://mypaipoboards.org/forum3/viewtop ... 1853#p1853

I believe the board was vacumm bagged, so the cork won't absorb water like Uncle G's. The cork is pretty robust but I'm not sure how easy it would be to repair it if it had a sizeable ding.

I spoke to a guy at a Fish Fry about cork adding floatation and he dismissed this outright. Any thoughts on this? I imagine the effect would be greater on a thin ply board.

Bob

krusher74 wrote: What thickness did you use?

It has two layers of ¼". one layer wasn't enough float for me..

bgreen wrote: I spoke to a guy at a Fish Fry about cork adding floatation and he dismissed this outright. Any thoughts on this? I imagine the effect would be greater on a thin ply board.
Bob

Years ago, but still within my lifetime,fishing floats of many sizes, life preservers, life rings, were made of cork, hell the old collapsible lifeboats even had mostly cork floatation .
Given a hunk of cork large enough, you could float just about anything..................

Uncle G,

When I nwxt hear from Huie I'll ask how thick the cork is, it may well be thinner than 1/4"/

Bob

I've seen some of the foam boards on Sway's with cork decks.
A thin layer of cork vac bagged to foam might seem seem like negligable flotation; until you've used cork to float plywood
or a man........

Object Density (g/cm3) Sink or Float
Cork 0.2–0.3 Float
Anchor 7.8 Sink
Spruce wood oar 0.4 Float

I've made several plywood boards with 1/2 inch cork on the deck. The first was glued with contact cement, because I was putting the cork on a used skimboard without sanding the varnish off the skimmer. It wasn't just a cork experiment, it was an experiment in making a quickie board in a day or two.
http://rodndtube.com/paipo/forum/viewtopic.php?t=438

All of my other cork boards were glued with Tightbond II glue. Cork glued to bare (unsealed) plywood with glue applied to both pieces. I used small paint rollers at first, but later switched to simply dumping the glue on from a gallon bottle, and then spreading it around with a plastic squegee. I place a plastic tarp on the driveway, then plywood (Glue up), then cork (Glue down) , then a 3/4 sheet of MDF or thick, flat plywood to protect the cork when I pile on rocks and sandbags. Sometime I use a trash can filled with water, and pile rocks around the base of the trashcan. I like the tighter glue joint that I get with the Tightbond II glue as opposed to the rubbery contact cement. The glue joint also sands better (if you are taking the cork all the way to the rail of the board.)

I seal the top of the cork with a drying oil, varnish, or both. Initially I wanted to prevent marine growth down in the nooks and crannys of the cork. I had a couple of boards where only the rails of the cork were sealed. They picked up noticable water weight. So I sealed them with Watco oil, and then sanded them lightly after the oil was dry. This allowed little bumps of cork to swell up. So now I try to strike a balance between bare and oversealed cork for the sake of traction. Something I haven't tried yet...sealing the cork deck with white latex paint or primer, then sanding it lightly to expose some of the cork. I did something similar by using a black oil-base stain under two coats of varnish, and then sanding the areas where I wanted the most traction.

The added bouyancy is enough to keep my head and sometimes shoulders above water while resting, but not too much to impede duck diving. Again I've only used 1/2 inch thick cork. You have the optiion of sanding out a concave deck to reduce the float. I did that on one of my boards, but it was mostly to make the rail easier to hold onto in a tumble.