advice, and lots of it please!

General Discussion
1

Just been reading the journey of a quad thread. Inspiring.

I really want to make my first board. I bottled it a while ago and had a mate do my singel fin fish.

But the shed’s clear and summer nights are here.

So i want advice. Whats the easiest and safest option to make.

I currently have a 9’4" heavy singlefin, a 6’2" singelfin fish which i love, a 6’4" swallow tail, an 8’5" minimal and an old 7ft pop out from the seventies.

I was tempted to take the shape from this popout, it’s very lightning bolt. Singlefin, pintail and fat.

So what would be your advice guys, I look forward to getting into it and sharing the trip with you.

happy waves!

2

my advice ?

" a 6’2" singelfin fish" ???

take a photo of that board , and post it here !

how many single fin fish have we seen at swaylocks , let’s face it ?

ben

[post edited]

3

shape the next board you want to add to your quiver…not what you (or someone else) thinks will be the easiest shape to hack out. not to sound like a nike commercial, but… just do it, man!

4

i reckon a nice old singlefin is a good place to start, especially if you have a favourite you can refer to while you work.

5

Isecond that notion of putting upo a pic of the single fin fish

6

Hi guys, thanks for the comments, I posted pics of the fish on here a while back I think, I’ll dig round for them.

It’s got a 10" box with two fcs sets, but they never get used. I really want to get into the singlefin, Im still struggling with it even after so many months, but when i get it right it feels like theres nothing underneath me, to coin a phrase, “like walking on water”.

7

here’s the pics of the fish. also, the rest of the family. The board on the far left is the board I was thinking of taking the shape from. maybe take a little width off.



8

Uhmmm - some advice, maybe neither good nor useful, but… in no particular order and please don’t take this as me ‘talking down’ to you -

You like the 1 fin fish you’ve got now? And were interested in the ( very well documented) Journey of a Quad thread? Well, maybe a quad fish then. Or whatever you’d like next, as has been said.

Make lots of templates. Check what you have done against your templates and do it often.

Use hand tools by preference. The surform, the rasp, the handsaw and hand plane. Make sure they are good and sharp.

It’s harder to screw up with hand tools and a moment’s inattention but with power tools one slip can make a helluva mess that you may not be able to salvage. When you have the hand tool methods understood it’s a far easier step to a power tool than trying to get the feel for the power tools and then everything else besides, all at once. All power tools are variations on some hand tool or other - the approach transfers nicely.

Glass-on fins are going to be easier to set for a beginner than boxes or plugs. In addition to the fact that if you get it a little wrong with a glassed on fin it’s correctable a whole lot easier than redoing a mis-routed plug or box.

Don’t go mad with color, graphics, pinlines and all that. It’s about the shape and the quality of the glassing first, second, third and all the way down the line. Get a few clear, well made boards done before you go to playing with colors and so on. The best paint job in the world won’t matter if it’s on a Yugo ( or Trabant, or Fiat, or…)

You will also find it is easier to do a good job of glassing ( early on) without the color, and the glassing, sanding, hotcoating, sanding, glossing, sanding and polishing are enough of a challenge.

Go light on your catalyst if you’re using polyester resin, if epoxy then try to pick a night on the cool end of the scale - that will let you do the glassing without having to race the resin to the finish. Pre-cooling your resin will help too, with either type.

Set things up so you are comfortable and the tools are easy to work with. It takes time to do this, but you will save time later on and turn out a better job too. Including lighting and so on - what you see well you will do well, especially if you’re doing it after your day job when your eyes are tired and your mind is a little numb.

When in doubt, stop and think about it. If you’re tired, call it a night. Going ahead when you’re not sure or worn down is how accidents happen, both to you and to your project-in-progress. It’s not like there’s a deadline, a promised delivery date or a penalty clause at work here, relax and have fun with it.

Now and then, take a night off from doing the work and have a nice…well, you’re in the UK… a nice warm beer and stare at it, plotting the rest of the job and thinking about how you might have done earlier stages better. Resist any temptations to pick up a tool of any kind; the bright idea you have after two beers isn’t that clever in the cold light of hangover, but do make notes to yourself.

hope that’s of use

doc…

9

that 's good , I like it !

especially the “two beer hangover” bit …does warming your beer get you pissed quicker [‘pissed’ = ‘drunk’ , here, not angry]

well…

thanks for the shots of your boards , Nick !

(the fish looks suspiciously like a swallowtail thruster to me , which was one of the reasons I wanted you to post a shot of it , to check.)

cheers ,

ben
10

nfotb,

If I was in your shoes, I’d print out Doc’s post and use it for reference - often.

That is one of the most concise and accurate pieces of advice I’ve seen. Wish I had been fortunate when I started both my woodworking and board building to have gotten such sage advise. Would have saved me much aggravation over the last 30 + years in the trade.

Great post Doc.

Pete

11

Thanks, Pete, for the kind words.

The thing is, at the end of (gawd, it’s been that long, hasn’t it) 35 years in the trades, I look back and realise I did get that advice back when.

Just that it took me 'til relatively recently ( and more screwups than I care to remember, let alone describe) to finally understand that The Old Man was right all along. Only took me a little over a third of a century to get that through my skull.

Funny - 'cos I’m about to bag woodworking for a living and go back to the fishing and shellfishing trade. Anything I do with wood or metal and the like from here on in is gonna be either peripheral to that or for pleasure and making a few things like some furniture for my own use.

at long last

doc…

Oh, and Ben? English Ale has some zip to it, take it from me… let alone what they make in Scotland…

12

Jesus Doc, I feel like I should have paid for that!

To be honest, everything you’ve mentioned seems like the one thing I reckon most people skip. COMMON SENSE! Thanks for that, it’s worth a lot.

I have a power planer, but it wasnt even coming into the equation. It’s strictly surform and sandpaper. No time limit, i really want this to be something special, it may be the only board I ever shape, it may be the first of many.

I lost my virginity to a fat girl on a wall behind a takeaway…

I want this to hold more memories than that!

Thanks again Doc. And thanks to Chipfish as always first to offer advice!

Happy waves,

13

Hi Doc -

That was a beautiful piece of understated brilliance.

It should be required reading to anybody ready to take the plunge.

14
Quote:

I lost my virginity to a fat girl on a wall behind a takeaway…

Wayull- you most definitely made Chipper’s day, right there. Possibly the whole of the year 2006 and maybe even the millennium. But…

The useful stuff isn’t necessarily the things that went right, more likely the things that could have been better that you learned from and improved on as you went.

And most of all the things that failed absolutely but you survived and won’t do again - put it this way, it’s real easy for me to be modest, on account of I have so much to be modest about.

Quote:

No time limit, i really want this to be something special, it may be the only board I ever shape, it may be the first of many.

That shows very good sense. I hate to say it, and I know I am gonna hurt some feelings, but when I see somebody who is working on their third board ( and the first two were kinda crude) starting to talk about turning pro…well, it’s kinda like somebody who has played football twice ( and not especially well ) talking about making a the Arsenal team or the World Cup. Or a so-so local surfer talking about making it in the ASP…

Have some fun with it. That’s what it’s all about. If it’s not, well, lots and lots of other things to do in this life.

Quote:

Jesus Doc, I feel like I should have paid for that!

(evil laugh )

You will. Somebody will need a little advice, or a hand with something, and you’ll discover you’re the guy who knows how. That’s payback, sorta like I’m paying back everybody who taught me.

Eventually you’ll find that your beard is white and your hair, what there is of it, is getting there too, that you are ( dammit, Rachel! ) old enough to be somebody’s grandfather… and you’ll find yourself boring the bejeezus out of innocent strangers, just like I do…

Enjoy, man. If by some chance I wander up your way, I may just let you buy me an ale -

doc…

15

Doc,

Can’t think of, or care to remember, how many times I was told some of the things you pointed out but was too head-strong or whatever to listen…and paid the price. Now I’m trying to pass some of it on to my 20 yr. old surf muscle of a son. But will he hear any of it? That’s a big, “NOOOOOO!” But he’s one of the best surfers (contemporary style - but I’m working on that) around here and that’s such a kick for me - love watching him surf.

As for that, “Step away from it and don’t angst over it” pause…Look around for some “Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale”.

Comes in pint bottles, brewed in England in honor of their 30 th anniversary and is quite good - warm or cold.

Pete

16

I’ll be damned: http://www.eurobrews.com/monty.html

Just the thing to accompany a discussion of the migratory habits of coconuts or bringing out the dead… thank you kindly, I have a buddy runs a liquor store who is what ya might call ‘biddable’…

How appropriate that it’s from Black Sheep Brewery. See, I happened to be looking at the town birth and marriage records for the early '50s, and it turned out that The Old Man was right about something else, namely when he referred to me as “You little bastard”…

Thanks again

doc… ‘mouton noir’…

17
Quote:

Pre-cooling your resin will help too, with either type.

Doc - could you please explain this a little deeper? I’ve never heard of pre-cooling. Great luck on the water, again.

18

First off, thanks for the good wishes - I think I am gonna need 'em.

Now, pre-cooling;

Ever notice that on hot days polyester or epoxy resin goes off faster than it does on cool days? Well, most ( though not all ) chemical reactions go faster when it’s warmer, slower when it’s cooler. On a hot day your resin may well go off faster than you can do a lamination, leaving you with a nasty problem to deal with.

You can slow down a polyester resin reaction by adding less catalyst, but with epoxy you have to add the same amounts of part A to part B or it may not harden at all. And if you’d like to have a little more time to do your laminating, for either type, one nice trick is to cool your resin off some, perhaps a few hours in the refrigerator before you use it.

It’ll be a little thicker, may take a little more work to squeegee or brush it into the cloth, but better that than having the stuff harden on you when it’s only spread halfway from centerline to rails.

Another thing- yes, it’ll warm up pretty quick when you have it in the cloth- all good. But what usually kicks too early is the resin in your cup/bucket/ whatever. How come? Well, resins ( like a lot of chemical reactions, which are classified as exothermic which means ‘heat out’ ) give off heat when they react. And this in turn makes the reaction go faster, which gives off more heat, which makes the reaction go faster still, which gives off even more heat, etc… the longer it is in your mixing pot, the more likely this is going to happen. This also happens with thick layers of ding fill and such, though the cabosil or other filler usually acts to slow down the reaction so you have to play both ends of the game -

But if the resin in the mixing pot is cooler to begin with, the longer it’ll be able to stay in your mixing pot without turning into a semi-solid. Again, you’ll have more time to do your thing with the cloth.

Now, I am not gonna claim this as my idea in any way. I’ve not only seen it mentioned here by other folks before, but I recall reading something called The Ship’s Husband by a guy called Callohan, who was a yacht skipper back in the early part of the last century, and he advised chilling varnish before use and keeping the can in an ice bath while using it.

And then there was the lab. See, at one time I was a chemistry student and later a teaching assistant, for my sins. Some reactions we did in the lab involved chilling the reagents in order to have the reaction go a particular way and not get out of control. For instance, if you want to do a nitrating reaction with toluene, to make mono-nitrotoluene, you chill everything and proceed slowly.

But in that particular class we had Kenzo. Kenzo was, perhaps, the beneficiary of an obscure government program like ‘Send a Whacko to College’ or something, and he had his own bit of chemistry going on most of the time involving lithium and maybe diazepan. In any event, Kenzo neglected to cool his reaction and instead of making mono-nitrated toluene he made a batch of Tri-Nitro Toluene… which is better known by it’s initials TNT. Life got…interesting.

In any event, hope that helps. For what it’s worth, the kids didn’t blow up the lab until the year after I left…

doc…

19
Quote:

But in that particular class we had Kenzo. Kenzo was, perhaps, the beneficiary of an obscure government program like ‘Send a Whacko to College’ or something, and he had his own bit of chemistry going on most of the time involving lithium and maybe diazepan. In any event, Kenzo neglected to cool his reaction and instead of making mono-nitrated toluene he made a batch of Tri-Nitro Toluene… which is better known by it’s initials TNT. Life got…interesting.

doc…

Thanks Doc - If you find some time, perhaps some shots of your boats on an off topic thread(?). I would be interested as I’m sure other’s would be too.

20

" I lost my virginity to a fat girl on a wall behind a takeaway…

Wayull- you most definitely made Chipper’s day, right there. Possibly the whole of the year 2006 and maybe even the millennium. But… "

…while we are on the subject of thread hijackings , **

I just have three words to say …

NO FAT CHICKS !!!

ben

** actually , come to think of it …it IS on topic …advice and LOTS of it … hehehahahhh

*** by the way Nick , does “nfotb " stand for ‘’ no fat old tranves bites” ???