Evening all. First time to post anything but questions. So inspired and overwhelmed by the amount of information I’ve read through in the past few years. Thanks to everyone for sharing their knowledge and helping each other along. I hope I can one day offer advice to those in the same boat.
Neck deep in my current build and would love some advice. Struggling to upload pictures at this time so bare with me.
Mad you can see I’m still very much a backyarder working in a very basic set up, but I guess we all started somewhere. Right?
What’s the blank? Your outline looks pretty gunny while the blank looks like a longboard blank, am I wrong? What kind of board are you aiming to shape, actually?
I made one for me that looked a lot like that except 9’2" and shaped from the 9’3"A USBlanks mold. This blank is in the “funboards” category and that’s pretty much what I was after; I wanted a fairly gunny outline and rocker coupled with longboard rails and bellied bottom. Weird, but worked good for me:
Wow nice board Balsa. Thanks for chiming I’m so quickly. I’ve read a lot of your posts. Really happy to be in touch. What kind of conditions did you have in mind when building it?. I’ll try and get you up to speed with my project. Def a gun though. The 10’8 BG blank come with around 7” of nose rocker and I’ve kept most of it up to this stage.
I’m building the board for a big right hander that can hold up to triple OH with the right swell direction. The board needs to paddle well to get in as early as possible and be able to charge down the line, not really necessary to turn very much, just a long straight ride down the line. Break has been likened to Lanis on the North shore. All kinds of boards are ridden at the wave at various takeoff points in the line up, but locals are all riding guns over 10’ usually with around 4” of meat on them so I’ve leaned that way with this build. You can see a lot of pencil marks on the blank so you notice I havent graduated to 100% eyeballing rail bands yet. I also do most of my banding using a small hand plane. It gives me a nice clean band but takes a lot longer to do.
So after looking over as many guns as I could get my hands on and reading thread after thread on gun design and filling my brain with a million different concepts and hoping to keep things as simple as possible I’ve decided to go with low (60/40 round abouts ) hard rails , hard through the tail starting around the fins. 2+1 fin set up. Belly in the the nose to flat and v in front of the fins, none of this has been done yet and I’m still debating to go vee or flat out the tail…leading me to my first question
what bottom contours do forum member s like for this kind of board? Am I on the right track with what I described above?
fin position for a 2+ 1 set up…I’ve found so much different info my brain is swimming.
Help me get a little perspective. You mention Lani’s on the NS, an alltime favorite of mine, when it is really big. Where are you located, and the location of your target break? The two guns I rode in 15 foot Laniakea, were 10’ 5’’ and 10’ 7’‘. The 10’ 5’’ board was the fastest. So, at 10’ 6’’ you’re in that ballpark. What is your target weight, for this board?
Hello Bill, thanks for your interest.sounds like at least the length is looking ok. Ive noticed now that my all of the photos are showing the wrong way up. Sorry im new to posting pics on here. Hope to get it sorted. As i mentioned the wave has been likened to Lanis. The actual spot is located in Japan off the coast from one of the smaller islands. It very hard to get infomation on in english. Ive only ever seen one othe foreigner out there. One of the locals used to be a regular at Lanis and ive surfed it before but never really big.As for weight its a hard question, its the biggest board ive made. The locals ride them very thick down here and i thought i would try to work from designs that seem to work well down here. beaked noses with penty of volume under the chest all the way through to the nose seem to be common. Ill pop is on the scales and be able to get a rough idea of the weight before glassing. I really appreciate any advice. Thanks for taking the time. Dunc
Some work blending the rails over the last couple of days.Feel like i had to unlearn a lot of what i usually do when workng on a shorter board. breaking rules or learning new tricks? happy at this stage. fair way to go though.
Hey mate. Never put yourself down, there are enough people in this world that will try and do that for you. I think the board looks awesome. Besides I’d imagine there are far more “backyard shapers” out there than shapers with fancy workshops. Keep the faithful brother
…hello; your outline looks smooth and clean. Very difficult to obtain guns outlines the right way. With semi guns I normally do the part between one ft from the tail to near the middle like Parrish and other gun makers. You know, outlines that look kind of straighter in that part but do not.
Did you blended templates?
Actually you do not need a beak nose to have all that thickness there. I do not like em but is easier to shape and to laminate.
Brick houses in Japan? or the photos are from Aussie land?
Thanks Sharkcountry; it’s been a real challenge and I feel like I’ve done more than a few thing wrong to get it to this point. Feel like my final image of the boards shape, especially the rail wasn’t clear enough when I got started. Perhaps due to my lack of experience shaping boards this long and thick. Getting there!
Thanks Simon. The process seems to often come down to having confidence in your decisions. I have flashes of that some days in the back yard. I guess this has been a tough one because it’s been so different from previous builds and the difficulty I’ve had actually getting my hands on similar boards to compare. Thanks for the support. Dunc
Haha I know. No walls means I’ve gotta give the space a super clean up after each shaping session or I end up with crap all over the place. It’s a bit of a pain but the clean up seems to be good thinking time about the next step. Keeps the wife off my back too.
