Hallo Swaylockians!
This is the first board I made. Now I’d like to have some impressions from you, who certainly are
more into the shaping/surfing process than me! 
I made it this summer in Greece (and I didn’t surf it because there were no waves/swells this summer in my island) in one week, working without knowing much about shaping…
I didn’t have any preshaped blank, it’s not easy and cheap to have them in Greece (but we do have waves! Not ocean-like waves, but still surfable waves). So I used a
extruded polystirene blank that is normally used to thermically isolate buildings.
That’s why it has that light cyan color. It had no natural rocker so I shaped the blank to have a
rocker, but just a bottom rocker. The deck is pretty flat because I didn’t want to have a very thin
surfboard with less resistence and floating capacity.
I was aware that cutting the foam in half to insert the wooden stinger would loosen the capacity of the blank to support the rider’s weight, so I decided to put a stinger perpendicular to a normal
surfboard stinger. I guessed that this would harden the whole surfboard, leaving it enough flexible.
I had many problems glueing it on the blank, in fact there are some air bubbles between the
two lyers of fiberglass I put on. I made very soft 50/50 rails.
The fin is attached and glassed on the stinger, and the leash plug is very homemade…you can see it,
please have a moderate laugh…
To glass it I used a single layer of 150grams/m2 fiberglass on every side and a SP106 laminating epoxy resin. I also used the same tresin to hotcoat it.
I used a template taken from the book I found o the net “Surfboard design and construction”, but I scaled down the original width because the blank was not large enough. I wanted a minimalibu like surfboard, wich is a good board for mediterranean waves.
Here are the measurements (hope you understand them, because I don’t know how to measure in
feet and inches, so I used feet and decimal fractions of feet):
length: 7,57 feet
width measured at 1 foot from nose: 1,342 feet
center width: 1,89 feet
width measured at 1 foot from tail: 1,267 feet
center thickness: 0.164 feet
Maybe next summer i’ll surf it (I live in Italy ad the board is in Kythira, Greece), hoping there’ll be
some waves… In the meanwhile I have fixed my delaminated deck surfboard, and I’m repairing some dings on a friend’s surfboard. I’m planning to shape a board for my sister who wants to start surfing. I red several topics on the forum and now I know many things more about shaping. I’ll make a completely different surfboard.
For now I’d like to have some feedback from you!
Ghia sas!
Tavlas
