Excellent. I use a Mac. What should I use to download a file?
Hi Greg,
Just download the same way you’d download anything else. Click on the template and you should be prompted to save it somewhere on you computer.
Mr. Mellor, Praytell, what is that little number going to grow up as? Did you do the widening yourself? If so, was the foam leftover "bones" from an outline? Curious dimensions. Thanks. Hope you are doing better these days.
winning
what program to open with? Adobe (PDF)?
thx
To open the zip files, right-click on the file and choose ‘open with’. Hopefully there will be a default selection. After you’ve converted the .zip file to a regular folder, try just double clicking on one of the PDFs to open it.
see the ‘read me’ link on the template page if you haven’t seen it yet. I’ll try to add a bit more info to it.
The board shown is 6'3"X29". It's a bellyboard.
I like the precision of the computer designs but by the time I've printed out each segment of the outline, joined them at the reference lines, traced them on to hard material and cut, I don't know if I'm really at much of an advantage. It just takes a few minutes to place some dimension points and connect the dots on a sheet of ply with a fiberglass rod.
If I had a machine nearby that could just mill the whole thing out to my specs, it might be another story.
PS - I just ordered up a US Blanks 6'8" Pavel fish blank with double 3" wide inserts. The foam cut very nice with no tearing out. Even with the inserts it was a tight squeeze.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I guess that may be the case going on forty years of making surfboards. Whenever someone comes to me and says teach me to shape I tell them to go make some templates out of tempered hardboard paying close attention to what their doing, not just downloading someone else’s stuff, that by no means is the answer. To me it shows a lack of creativity. Nothing better than having the experience of making templates to help train a gremmies (as Velzy called all of us) hands and eyes and help develop the skills to become a good shaper. If you think by downloading those on paper and then transferring them you going to come up with the right stuff your drinking the wrong coolaid. Your skipping a vital part in the process of trying to become a craftsman- it is that simple. So call me a whatever, but at the end of the day I know how to shape, any board, any time, because I have put in the time to learn to work with my mind, eyes and hands.
i agree. This isn’t meant to be ‘the answer’ to anything. But for someone just starting out, thinks can be pretty overwhelming. There are a shit ton of variables to consider and i’m simply providing a starting point. If this helps someone shape a board who otherwise wouldn’t, i’d say that’s a plus. Again, this is meant to spark creativity not prevent it, if you can believe it. It’s just curves on a piece of paper after all. How they decide to transfer them is out of my hands. I would hope people would tweak these and reinterpret them as they see fit. Thanks for checking it out…assuming you did check it out.
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Maybe I'm missing something here, but I guess that may be the case going on forty years of making surfboards. Whenever someone comes to me and says teach me to shape I tell them to go make some templates out of tempered hardboard paying close attention to what their doing, not just downloading someone else's stuff, that by no means is the answer. To me it shows a lack of creativity. Nothing better than having the experience of making templates to help train a gremmies (as Velzy called all of us) hands and eyes and help develop the skills to become a good shaper. If you think by downloading those on paper and then transferring them you going to come up with the right stuff your drinking the wrong coolaid. Your skipping a vital part in the process of trying to become a craftsman- it is that simple. So call me a whatever, but at the end of the day I know how to shape, any board, any time, because I have put in the time to learn to work with my mind, eyes and hands.
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Read it again folks! There is much sound advice offered here. Well said, g-rat.
Here we go again, shitting on someone who spent a lot of time and effort on his part to help out some of us garage hacks. I think its a decent idea to help point the way for someone who has no idea how to come up with a functional outline. It’s just a start of a process that involves many other design features.
Why does learning to shape a board have to be done with some freaking “Kill Bill” journey to a far off land to learn and train in the way of some Zen Master shaper who deems his pupil unworthy of such great and important knowledge? Silly peasants, I put in “x” amount of years honing my craft, walking 15 miles to the glass shop, barefoot in the snow and up a hill both ways. Don’t trace a template off a proven shape either, it’s highly illegal and don’t forget to kiss the ring on the way out.
I just started making boards again after about 5 years off for some health issues and man has it got expensive. About double the cost it was when I left off. Not everyone has the cash to cut their teeth on experimenting with dozens of blanks and refining your outlines.
This is not totally directed at you Ghetto. I know Bill, you and many other knowledgeable guys post tons of helpful info here. It may not be said a lot but it’s appreciated greatly by the less experienced guys. Your post just set me off because there always seems to be a whiff of arrogance and bitterness around here with sharing of knowledge because they didn’t “suffer and earn it”.
Not everyone here is going to be a production shaper or make some sort of career out of it. It’s mostly backyard garage guys that just want to make a functional surfboard without being looked down upon because they supposedly “cheated”.
These are outlines, nothing more nothing less, a starting point with many other obstacles to overcome. I don’t care how bad you are as a craftsmen but you will become a better one no matter what after making a surfboard. It’s something that every surfer should do in their lifetime I believe. For many it will be just one board and if a simple template printed out helps them on their way there’s no harm in that.
That’s an awesome piece of generosity. Hope some good karma comes your way for it.
A few years ago, when I joined shaperoom.net here in France, the idea was to provide guys who wanted to make their own boards with some piece of advice that nobody would give me when I started back in the late '60s; I thought it was basically a good idea to give back what I had learnt mostly through trial and error, just to save guys the pain of doing the same mistakes.
The result is this, today: people join the website asking for detailed dimensions of Al Merrick’s boards, then they go to AtuaCores to have a polystyrene blank cut out to those dimensions (outline and rocker already cut, they just need to shape rails and bottom configurations such as concaves and/or V.
As a result, I tend to spend less and less time on the site, picking up very carefully the questions that I try to give answers to.
The more you give to people, the less they will do by themselves. Sad but true.
I couldn’t agree more with you, Ghettorat.
This is not to say that what you did is not great, jjlam. Actually, it could be a very interesting tool providing people would use it as a starting point, not as something already done and ready to copy and use. That’s why I posted the link on shaperoom.net. But I strongly doubt people will use it in a clever and creative way…
Besides, as we all know, outline is not (by far) the most important part of any board…
Hey JJlam
I’m just a backyardie hack and love the feeling of riding something that I have made myself. I started making my own boards about 7 years ago, the first 3 boards the outline was lucky to be symmetrical… with the lumps and bumps all over them on both sides!! So for a guy like me who didnt really touch tools until then it would of made a difference!! So thanks from all the guys like me when I was starting out.
Agree with Balsa that the outline isnt the most important thing… but its a good start!
Hi jjlam -
I don't know if JohnnyK3's comments were directed at me but I suppose I'm guilty as charged if they were. If you saw the rest of the story, you'd know that I'm just a backyard hack doing it all the hard way.
In all fairness you did a nice job on the website and it is generous of you to offer the templates for free. After playing around on the site I see that it's not intended for direct conmputerized machine cutting.
Anyway, sorry for the highjack. I can see where the templates could be mighty useful to someone getting started. They could be mighty useful to anyone who doesn't have a stack of templates of their own.
Some interesting thoughts there ghettorat. I agree with some of what you say. As a construction foreman by trade I have observed that some of the best tradesmen are those that have been thrown into the deep-end at some stage and been forced to figure things out for themselves. Finding out first hand by trial and error why things are done can be a great way to learn. However this must be tempered with a bit of reality.
When I learned to shape there was nobody to show me how to do it. The two local shapers here didn’t want to show me and there was no internet to speak of back then. All I had was a ratty old book circa 1968 that I dug out of the library. I was fortunate enough to walk in on a local shaper while he was glassing a board and watch him for ten minutes. This was the extent of my glassing education. I also had good tool skills, a builder’s eye and as an experienced surfer a reasonably good idea of what I like to see in a board.
My mantra when I started shaping was “keep it simple”. For my first few boards I tried to exactly copy one of my favourite boards. My theory was that I had enough to worry about trying to figure out how to roll the deck, shape the rails etc. Once I had mastered the basics I started tweaking the template, rocker etc a bit. Now I’m making my own templates and the like.
My point in a round about way is that I agree that people need to figure things out for themselves in a lot of respects, but exactly what route they take depends on their prior experiences and their resources. I pretty much had nothing to go on, and very limited amounts of cash to waste on failed experiments, however I believe that as far as back yard shapers go I’m now relatively competent. If I had to copy the template of my favourite board to get there then so be it.
Wow…quite a bit of effort and well done. I’m sure there are people on this forum who just want the “experience” of building a surfboard and riding it. They probably have little interest in becoming a “craftsman” or doing more than 1 or 2 boards for that matter. Having a template or being able to borrow a template just makes the process easier. People sing karaoke, and while often they’re not particularly talented musicians, nor do they aspire to becoming professional singers, they truly enjoy singing and the karaoke machine makes it easier for them to have the experience of singing with a band. What’s wrong with that? Not a thing. So, thanks for your generous effort and I hope it encourages someone to shape a surfboard who otherwise might not.
But for some, shaping surfboards has gone way beyond the production of a few boards. It has become a powerful, creative expression that demands commitment to the pursuit of the “perfect shape”. Perfect not just in build-design but perfect in build-execution as well. Creating templates for outline curves is an intimate part of this quest for perfection. Such shaper/craftsmen have learned the nuances of bezier curves by bending sticks and rods until they conformed to some image in their mind’s eye. They have carefully transferred those curves to masonite and just as carefully fine-tuned them with a block plane and sandpaper. They have learned to blend the curves from different templates, to create almost infinite variations. They derive almost as much joy from creating the template as they do from creating the board itself. The template becomes a prized tool for the shaper, and his template collection defines his body of work. (There’s a wonderful segment in the movie “Glass Love” in which Pat Curren makes a template for a board he’s shaping for his son Tom. Watching it changed how I approached template making.) What’s wrong with that? Again, nothing.
On this forum, we need to remember that there are only two kinds of people in the world; those who shape surfboards and those who don’t. Within the former group lie a variety of people with a wide-range of skills, knowledge, experience and interests. For me, its the diversity that makes this place interesting.
Nice looking site. Well done.
Gettorat,
I agree with you in concept, that you won’t learn if someone justs hands you the answer.
Today is a different age than forty years ago. With most boards machine made in a foreign country, the handing down of experiences is becoming lost. You had great masters to teach you. Today, most of those masters are unavailable to take on an apprentice.
The next generation, if there is to be one, needs to be trained in a different method. Templates on-line isn’t much different than, in your youth, working in a shop and having templates hanging on the wall for you to copy, or at least steal a look at.
The first step is looking at what has been done; no sense re inventing the wheel. Taking what you learned, and expanding.