Buildthread- "shortish" 2+1 Singlefin

I enjoy reading build-threads, so I´ll have a try and start one, too.

This will be board Nr. 11.

I wanted a board with a little “performance” combined with a classic and relaxed touch.

I´m a bad surfer and a lazy one. So “performance” means I want to duckdive it and want it to handle better waves from waisthigh to slightly overhead maybe.

I went for something eggish, quite short (for my skills and my weight, I´m 6ft4 and 230lbs), but with a sharper nose for the duckdiving.

It will end up around 6.5x21.3/4x3 or so.

It´s 2 lbs EPS, bottom will be 2x5oz both full laps +  a finpatch for the US Box, deck will be 1x5oz deckinlay + 2x5 oz with full laps.

As always I start with looking for boards that fit my aims and start drawing and comparing outlines.

Rocker will be a tad more than 4.5inch in the nose and nearly 2 inch in the tail.

The tail has a good amount of area, the nose is fishy but slim enough to swing nicely and pierce the water easily when duckdiving.

I make 2 templates from 3mm masonite for the foil and hotwire the foil from a block of EPS.

Than I make a template for the outline and hotwire the outline.

Roughing in the deck and bottom surface with 60grit paper in a wood by hand.

I do it by hand and eye, final checking is with a digital bevelbox on severa spots spread over the length.

Usually when my eyes tell me bottom and deck are parallel, the bevelbox is within ± 0.1 degree.

Close enough for my surfing skills.

After sanding the outline rectangular, I shape the bottom.

This one gets a little single concave under the frontfoot (flatting out the rocker, giving some “gaspedal” hopefully) and a little segment of a Vee sitting in some kind of channels.

I thought this coul work with the single fin alone as well as with a quad setup and should give some good hold and release at the same time. Maybe… who nows. It´s just fooling around with some bottomshapes and test how it works out.

Than I start cutting the railbands.

I´ve read how Bert Burger does it and after I´ve tried it his way, I prefer it over other ways.

I start from the bottom and do the deck after that.

I don´t take no measurements any more. The first3 boards I stayed close to the greenlight railband sketches. But skipped that after board 3.

I figure out how high/low I want the apex to flow and how big of a radius I want and translate this into railsbands coming from the bottom up to the deck.

This is easier and more natural to me than taking numbers and drawing lines and try to connect them.

After rough cuts with my cheapo planer it looks like this.

Smoothing it out with 80 grit and it looks like this.

Single concave under the frontfoot. 1/5inch roundabout.

Tail

Next step is routing the FCS Fusion and the singlefin box.

I reinforce the box with wooden stripes and put everything under 2x5oz + 1x5oz (patch) glas lateron.

I know, most of you warn people from setting it into the foam before glassing, because it is looking for trouble.

But it seems to work for me. I´ve done it  4 times this way and every fin is straight in the finished board (I always check).

Tail with fin-layout and outline/shape:

I´ve made an sword from an alloy bar with a slightly tapered pressfit on my lathe. It fits the finbox very snug. I use it to align the box and for checking in the end.

Today I spackled the bottom.

I use “presto onetime”, thinned with destilled water it´s like shaving foam. I think this is the closest thing to DAP faf we can get here in germany.

I only do a very thin coat and scrape it of tight with a hard squeegee. It barely covers the bead-holes and needs just very minimal sanding.

Bonding eps/glass is very good. (did test with several spackles). The epoxy soaks quite deep into the eps.

But even this thin coat improves the look of tints very much compared to not spackling.

Best compromise between looks and “no delam mumbo jumbo” (copyright Resinhead I think) for me when I do it this thin.

The left side is spackled, the channel is still unspackled for comparison.

Bottom done with spackling:

When the deck is spackled, it will be ready for glassing.

Don´t know when I´ll glass it.

Got a broken collar bone on the right and am a little handicapped at the moment.

Not much, I´m gettin better at shaping and sanding with left, spackling went okay with left as well. But it´s not as natural as with my right arm/hand.

I´m not sure if glassing will be okay. I´ll see and will keep you updated.

If you see something “doubtful” in the pictures or if I do some procedures in the wrong way or combine bottom contours/finlayout/tailoutlines  in a disastrous and stupid way, please comment and don´t hesitate to criticize.

Michael

 

The board looks really good and it appears your process is working for you.   I like the finbox reinforcement.  I’ve always wanted to try that with a stringerless blank.  Did you rout the stringers in first and then do the box or did you do it all at once?  

 

(gave you a point for it, keep up the good work)

Thanks for thr point.

I route it all at once, everything is 1inch deep.

Sometimes I do the finpatch first, route, sand everything and do the 2xoz bottom.

(mostly when I want the finpatch to be seen as a darker tint colour)

But I´ve also routed in the bare foam (like I did this time), did 2x5oz bottom and a feathered clear patch.

I do this when I don´s want to see the patch, it´s one step less.

Cool.  I think your install looks really clean.  

I’ve used the wooden paint stirrers a couple times to reinforce finbox repairs, and I’ve also used high density inserts (like 4#  PU foam) that tie the deck and bottom laminations together, and then routed my boxes into those.    

This is what makes “sways” cool.

I think you have done an amazing job. I also love the finbox reinforcement.

There should be more of it.

I hope you get lots of interest and feedback. for some reason i haven’t been getting much on my build threads of late, maybe they all think I’m beyond hope haha.

I love the little template program, does it let you print out full size versions or do you use it to hand draw them?

 

 

I hope you get lots of interest and feedback. for some reason i haven’t been getting much on my build threads of late, maybe they all think I’m beyond hope haha.

 

I´ve read all your buildthreads at least twice. Couldn´t answer till now, cause I hadn´t registered. Please continue to show you work and your process.

The outlines and foils are done in CAD (I use the draft sight freeware). I coul plot them in the office in fullsize if I wished.

But I join the front half and the back half of the board to one template and print them on 3 standard sheets on  my printer.

You can see the template and the sheets (numbered from 1 to 3) in the upper right corner.

I transfer the paper template to masonate with like 1/8", the final touch (smoothness and flowing bends) are done on the masonite with a beltsander and hand sanding.

No progress with Nr. 11, but I finally finished Nr. 10.

Nr. 10 is a refined Version of Nr.3, which I liked a lot and surfed like 90% of the time.

Mostly it´s more thinned out and sharper rails, 10-15% less volume.

You all know where I stole the shape. The colour design is pretty much stolen from a few boards Matt Parker / Album surfboards did.

Fillcoat sanded, preparing some coulourwork.

Lateron it looks like this:

 

 

It´s 6.2223 , appr. 43 liters

 

 

 

Forgot the rockershot…

appr. 4.1/2" nose / 2" tail

Ausgezeichnet Michael! All of those projects together in the rocker shot: house, speakers, turntable, amp, board…

Your tape work for the red MiWi logo takes me back 40 years to the stepfather showing me how to do this for model cars and planes.

Thank you.

The tape+pencil might be a bit outdatd, yes.

A buddy called me and said “Man, why you´re doing it this way. I could easily plot you tons of logos on my computer cutter on masking tape. Would be way faster.”

The thing is, I like the process beeing slow. Good for my state of mind.

 

Nice job. Bummer about the collarbone. I do some things the slow way on purpose, like hand sanding my glass jobs. Some people don’t get it, but I like to savor the process. I understand that.

Nice skills and approach.  Thanks for sharing.

I do the sanding by hand, too. “savor” is the right description (will try to remind the word and add it to my vocabulary)

The collarbone is not a big restriction suprisingly. Though the doc says it´s not growing together by now, I can use the right arm quite a bit. Actually I´m enjoying how I´m training my left arm/hand and how coordination is rapidly getting better.

All the sanding of Nr. 10 was done with the left hand. At the end I felt nearly as comfortable as with the right hand, let´s say  80-90% or so.

I glassed the deck of Nr. 10 shortyl after I broke the collarbone. Pulling the laps around was hard, because it was to painful with right and to ugly performed with left. But I think I´m ready for glassing Nr. 11 soon.

But not next weekend, will do a trip to the sea.

I´m really yearning to at least paddle a bit around in the water (pop up will be to risky I think), though my wife is insisting.

The most critical part will be if I manage to squeeze my shoulders into my chestzip…

:slight_smile:

 

Gute Arbeit!

Slow progress…

The broken collarbone wouldn´t heal and they decided for a surgery. Found it broken in 4 parts (on the x-rays it looked like a single fracture). Got a couple of screws and plates now and I´m not allowed to put any wheight on it for 6 weeks.

So I gave my “left handed glassing” another try. (My wife got angry for me for moving to much but I can´t stop shaping and glassing for so long. Keeping my feet still makes me crazy.)

I´ve already built some “one handed” shaping tools,too. :slight_smile:

This one gets a bloodish red.

It´s not quite a tint.

More like a little transluszent opaque.

Srew up of the day:

Outgassing (first time for me)

I thought my basement was quite stable concerning the temperature over the day.

Weather report announced quite a hot day and contrary to my habits I decided to not glass in the evening (falling temperatures) but in the morning. I knew I was looking for trouble.

I´ve put the blank in the warm upper floor 2hrs prior glassing and than carried it back in the basement for immediate glassing.

Hoped the increaed blank core temperature would be sufficient and not been overtaken by the rising room temperature.

After 90 Minutes when I was back for checking everything was okay, the basement had gotten warmer and warmer and a little outgassing bubble on the deck near the nose rose.

Had to cut it a bit and pressed it back down with a hard roller.

The resin was still tacky, the glass is securely attached to the foam. (I´ve tried to pull small parts apart the next day).

But the coulour looks ugly from pressing it back down and cutting it.

(got no pictures, I was freaking a bit and trying to fix it as long as the resin was tacky)

The plan is:

Instead of only doing a 2/3 deckpatch, I´ll do a full deckpatch with quite opaque red and hide the coulour-fault where the bubble has been. That little more wheight won´t do any harm.

 

Laminating is done, except for the finpatch around the US-box.

Actually I´m waiting to flip it and do the cutlap.

I´ll take pictures when I´ve done the cutlap.

I got a question, maybe you can tell me what you think:

With channels or other geometry that challenge my poor glassing skill, I tend to work the glass/resin only light and only pull it very little pressure.

(when I work it hard, I just mess it up and pull the channels up again and again, distort the weave and so on - I´ve tried the trick with the tacky resin in the channels but it still slips).

I don´t pull the weave as dry and tight as I do on simple bottoms and decks.

What do you think, is this lam to wet ? (it´s the bottom of this board)

I´ve used about 270gr mixed epoxy per one layer of 5oz (166gr./m²) on this 6.5x22 board on the bottom.

 

Looks fine to me, if you can see the texture of the weave you should be ok IMO.

The tacky resin trick works great for me, dunno why youre having a problem with it , but your pics show you’re on the right track.

I think if you feathered the edge of your cutlap a little more you could avoid that dark line of resin pooling at the edge. But hey thats what pinlines are for :slight_smile:

Best wishes on the bones healing up!

Thanks for your comment Huck.

I should have feathered the edge a little more indeed. Or do a little clear cheatercot in the edge.

If this had been a deck the feathering would have been sufficient most likely, I had pushed the glas down harder with the squeegee to get that pooling out.

But on this bottom I´m still struggeling with pushing down stronger and at the same time get the channel-edges right.

I´ll work on both with the next boards.

By now the left hand is inferior compared to my right hand when it comes to control the squeegee and it lacks the feeling to get the right pressure. But it´s gettin better a little bit every time.

Tomorrow I´ll do a tinted finpatch and then I´ll roughen everything for the fillcoat.

 





I love the fillcoat step.

Knowing I´ll soon hit it with the sander hurts, yes, a little bit.

But: It´s always the first step for me, that gives me a glimpse that there might be beautiful swan hidden in the ugly ducklin that it was till now.

The colours start glowing, the surface gets a first imperfect shine and so on…

 

 

Looking mighty fine!!!