Ask anyone who makes surfboards and they'll tell you: glassing is the pits. Done right, it ensures a surfboard's strength and longevity; done wrong, it's the weakest link in the boardmaking chain. Either way, you'll end up with a board that takes weeks to set truly hard, and a floor covered in gloopy, hard to handle resin waste.

Unless, of course, you're using Sun Cure.

So what's that, you ask? Maybe we'd better start at the beginning. Most surfboards you'll see are glassed using polyester resin, which starts its life as a dribbly liquid plastic. The glasser mixes this liquid plastic with a small amount of a chemical called MEKP. This stuff -- known as "catalyst" or "hardener" -- forces the liquid resin to turn solid. The glasser, once he's mixed the resin and catalyst, has somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes to work with the mixture before it begins to set. And although the board may "feel" hard, it won't reach its true strength for up to three weeks.

Sun Cure is a resin brand that doesn't use catalyst. [Comment: Sun Cure uses one of the most popular resins available, Silmar®. The only difference between traditional resin and Sun Cure is the hardener] Instead, it uses UV radiation to trigger the resin-setting process. The result? Resin that sets rock-hard in minutes, exactly when you want it to, with no exposure to toxic MEKP and associated fumes.

Not just that -- you can reclaim and reuse excess resin using a simple floor drain and filter, according to Sun Cure's Dale Christenson. "We figure with normal resin, using one 55-gallon drum will waste around $150 of resin on the floor," says Dale. "Then you've got to chip it up and dispose of it. Every boardmaker knows that problem."

Sun Cure users include Half Moon Bay's Jeff Clark, Manasquan Inlet's Fly, and San Diego's Diamond Glassing, which offers a special glass job using extra-strong S-cloth glass with the Sun Cure resin. Surf Prescription's Doc Lausch has also tested the resin with some good results.

But using Sun Cure means changing a glass shop's mode of operation -- bringing in UV light "beds" for accurate curing, resin draining, staff re-training. Couple that with the surfboard industry's natural resistance to change, and it's easy to see why there aren't more boards glassed with Sun Cure.

Yet. Florida-based Dale says he's been around for 16 years so far, and he isn't freaking out. "If anyone wants to join in, we're here," he says. "We're not going anywhere." --NC