I am making my first board, a 5-11 retro profile fish, 22" wide, 11.5" across the crack. I am using the 6-8P blank, and so far I have skinned the blank, cut and trued the outline from the template. Today I spent 2 hours sureforming 1/8" off of the overall thickness of the blank from the bottom. Yeah…tomorrow I am buying a planer. That blank has a lot of foam.
The blank has a slight dome built into deck. I know fish decks are pretty flat. Should I plane the dome out of this blank before I finish foiling it? The 6-8 P has so much foam, it seems like a good blank for beginners cuz you can fix mistakes.
Fastest way to mow down foam is the 3" long mini hand plane, cut across the stringer at 90 degrees, will chunk some, so don’t cut too deep. Easily thin a blank over 1/2" in 5 minutes, then takes 15 minutes cleaning up the chunks with sureform and sanding block.
two hours to take off 1/8" of foam from the bottom of a fish?
next time try this, get a piece of 36 grit sandpaper, spray glue it to a 8.5 x 11 inch chunk of plywood, and then glue a handle onto the plywood. That will take down foam and give you a nice flat bottom surface as well.
(for decks/curved surfaces make the same thing but instead of plywood use a 1" piece of foam rubber, the kind like you sit on in a chair).
It’s not going to take you 2 hours to remove 1/8" of foam using one of these. More like 5-10 minutes.
You still need a block plane of some kind to work on the stringer. If you only get one make it small, they work everywhere. The small Stanley trim plane is good and costs less than $10.
If you take the dome out of the deck you will be removing a lot of foam in the center of the blank. Never a good thing. You will lose a lot strength and, once glassed, you will get deck depressions fairly quickly.
trim as little off the deck as possible and m,aybe lay an extra layer of glass to compensate.