Cleaning the foam mess - Part 1

General Discussion
1

For the bens squared, jarrod, dan, drew and all the rest.

After working ourselves (my brother and I) into exhaustion these past two weekends in between rainstorms we finally notched another three out of the way. three more to go a canoe a SUP or two and we’ll claim our backyard patio again from the foam epidemic nightmare… Ahh retirement to just surfing is but a handful of blanks away…

Aside from the thre board CMP is putting fin boxes in for us we also cleaned out these three projects and started two more.

BOARD 1

A clark foam Alexander shaped 6’10" Gemini (also razzed as the “Devil Board” by my harrassing brother) acquired pre-blank monday from CMP (Thanks CMP!).

Silver texalium+4oz S on the deck

Blue texalium bottom which had to be bagged on cause it was so stiff. The blue is alot different that the silver we used on the deck.It still needs a filler coat… The unusual pits are from bagging the glass on.

A hi-tech looking board with texalium skins needs matching fins so why not slap on ~$200 worth of FCS fins… Wonder how this setup is ging to work? Only used futures 3/2 's on my other Gem.

BOARD 2

Our main focus has been to finish this 10 footer from a custom 10’3Y 1lb EPS blank with 1/2" redwood stringer from CMP… “Thanks again CMP!”

A happy niece and her slave driving and respectably good amateur shaper dad. Not bad if you realize he’s standing in our wonderful “shaping room”.

Pink seems to be the chosen color for young nieces. A big 12" single for dad-daughter tandeming and possible SUP activity.

New family logo

BOARD 3

6’2" Bamboo skinned horizontal stringer lowes EPS with 1.5" corecel rails

1.75 inches thick by 23.5" wide and 6’2" tall Bert burger inspired quad fish for a 50 yrs old 195lber (we hope)

Hand made corcel foam core fins with rice paper lam skins, front single foil with a slight inside curve, backs double foiled both are hand foiled thicker than usual.

And the little humuhumunukunukuapuaa shall lead the way.

I saw a sandpiper this morning playing in the shorebreak at dawn could’ve watched the little guy all day it was that amazing. Watching him follow the suck back and run out of the way as the shore pound tried to slam it. Kind of like watching high performance speed surfing in my opinion. Nature is so full of surprises. Didn’t even surf it was so bad we went home and exhausted ourselves trying to finish these boards.

be nice to just worry about only surfing on the weekends for once…

Anyway enjoy!

I’m bushed…gonna be sore tomorrow.

2

Looking Good!

3

wow

what can i say

you are like a machine brother

love those boards mate

4

Nice set of boards! I really like the bamboo bottom - its just the way that I was planning to use mine.

5

Looks is one thing but froma usability standpoint if your doing wood rial I’d use it strictly as a deck covering skin.

Cause once you glass it the thing’s hard as rock. You’ll never get pressures.

Also you don’t want to cut it after lamming it on as it shred like fine steel razor wire.

Like putting in your fin blocks…

If you want a rock hard deck and a soft bottom, I’d do your diaginal balsa bottoms and the bamboon on a concave deck with wood rails. The board would be rock solid and still flex from the bottom skin.

Just a suggestion.

We ended up with the bamboo on the bottoms cause that how we set the rocker in all our cheapo Lowes balnks and it’s easy to cut out the bamboo versus building a a sheet for the bottom out of strips. But looking backwards we’d do the balsa on the bottom and the bamboo on the deck for strength. Even a 12" strip of the stuff down the middle of your deck will reduce the chance of any pressures over the years… Good economical way of inserting the stuff with balsa to make the most use of it in your longboards…

I think Gary Young used to underlay his fancy wood boards (koa. etc etc) with this stuff or decell to make the board rock hard before glueing or glassing on a thin sheet of the fine wood veneer over the top. That way the bamboo gave you the strength you needed and the fancy wood gave you the looks without compromising the structural integrity… Those EPS boards would be stiff and light like a surftech unless you glassed them heavy. But this is just a guess as I never held one yet…

Test yours yet?

6

Your Bert-style quad looks fast! Love that upside-down shot of how thin & foiled the board is…should make you feel like 48 again, 49 at the most :wink:

Gustave’s Sons do nice work.

Eh, goo’ fun. All pau. Now, brah, time go surf.

7

That’s some great stuff!

Love the gem, and that fish looks tits! Great effect with the corecell rails and balsa nose- and tail-blocks, looks really nice. Can’t wait to hear how it rides. Can’t imagine how you keep up that pace. I’m still looking at the same three unfinished boards on my racks, two needing glass and one needing hotcoats. I would say don’t bernout, but I think that point would have come a long time ago if it was going to.

Way stoked for you!

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By the way, what ever happened to CMPs webpage? I used to love checking out his new stuff every so often, and now I just get “page unavailable”.

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CMP was trying to update his site with new baorsd and move it all to another server and then lost everything in the process. I think he feels better being off the grid at this point with everything going on and what he’s getting involved with and I’m happy for him he cause he couldn’t be with a better group of people and is learning new stuff as each day goes by…

He told me the other day he wish he knew there were real down to earth guys like this out there 10 years ago when he was struggling on the northshore getting ripped off by every tom, dick and harry in the business.

Who knows what new things he’s gonna come up with, with the stuff he’s learning from guys pushing the envelope.

By the way as a side note, he emailed me this weekend to ask me how I wanted my fins and mentioned he just started shaping a lowes horizontal bamboo stringered blank I gave him about a year ago. I think that’s pretty good that the blank kept the saran wrap bent in rocker all this time. (It was a rocker copy of my surftech merrick flyer). He said it shaped pretty good too for junky lowes foam, that made me feel better about using the stuff.

But if I ever make a board for someone else than me, I’ll be using Jim Richardson’s pre-molded MARKO blanks cause they make one hell of an easy 7’6" (Bullet) funboard. I guess the foam of the “it” foam on the market nowadays. Kind of funny that no one said anything last year when CMP and I bought about a dozen of them to play around with.

Hey those guys at skurfer need a slap in the head making joke about your Telly Savalas especially since Matt B gave you props for your handiwork. You know you’re definitely in the pro ranks as far as quality…

Just remembering how this all got started on Skurfer with your PM to me about my gem experience way back when.

It reminds me I need to get your box with some new skin materials to play with out in the mail.

That should get your juices going again…

I must be the swaylocks version of santa or something, hmmm…

Nah it makes me happiest just to spread around the pure spirit of this place…

Now I just want to spend alot more time test piloting all the cr*p I’ve been building and buying so I can decide what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of.

Later

b

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wow !

…and I love those fabric inlay quad fins , mate …like to tell us a bit about them please ? [eg: handlaid up ? vacuum babgged ? wood core ? …or , WHAT ?!]

cheers !

ben

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Aloha Ben-SH(for southern hemi)

They were hand laid up with 3 layers of 6 oz on each side and are actually some WASHI japanese pre-printed rice paper(want some?). Silly and I must be on the same sways wave length cause he just did the same on his latest.

I didn’t vacuum bag them which is what I wanted to do but didn’t have the time to set it up…

I started by templating out my Mandala quad fins on some 1/2" corcel foam and hand shaping them as close as I could get them with the exception that I put some inside foil on the front fins as I’ve been envious of his and Pavel’s Lokbox Turbo Speeddialer fins they started using after I got my board from Manuel. I think the cord is 80/20 or something like what ever Rich suggested somewhere here.

After glassing the paper on and then grinded and hand sanded everything down I laid out some rope and a glass strip along the leading edges and repeated the grind and hand sanding bit. Even with gloves I got the itchies something bad…

Oh yeah I did some keels out of 1lb EPS with the same technique for a future project.

finally we foiled everything again and matched them again before tacking them on with 5 minute epoxy while duplicating the cant on the front fins from the originals. It’s funny cause the cants on the futures that Manny included were different between the left and right sides… We then glassed on the fins yesterday with rope and 2 sheets of 4oz on each side.

The fins are super stiff, super light and more importantly real different(colorful). They are also thicker and more foiled than the originals especially the back rudders. I really needed super light fins on this board because it’s so thin (1.75" max thickness). Hey but if big Bert can do it, I should be able to get it to go…

I had bought 2 sets of d-cell/glass fins from Fiberglass Hawaii but they were too heavy. Plus the profile wasn’t right for such a wide and thin board… These short quads should fit the bill if this board will only float me enough to catch a wave.The bottom is a single flowing into a double and the core is light .75 EPS while the rails are dense corecel and the bamboo deck skin overlaps the rails 1/2" while the bottom doesn’t. Unfortunately since it’s 100% top and bottom bamboo I don’t think she’ll flex at all. This may end up to be san diego swaylocks freebie we’ll see…

But to tell you the truth, I am more interested in riding my new texalium 6’10" Alexander Gemni with the ProBoxHawaii inserts so I can play around like you with all my FCS/Hanalei Fin combinations. That thing is so decadent I even sprayed the deck with a glo-in-the-dark treatment for evening surfing. My brother said the reflection from the decks silver texalium will make me blind. But I’m really interested in seeing how she goes with the webber curved CRVs up front and the 10 degree canted H2’s in the back.

I can’t believe I actually went out Friday and bought those damn $100 H2’s. But alot of guys have been raving about them with the 3D Redtip. I actually tried that setup Saturday morning on my orange splashed Parmenter 9’ pintail performance longboard and wasn’t that impressed. The board didn’t loosen up as much as I wanted. But I have tons of other boards to cycle these fins through to find my magic combo…

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hey, i was wondering where you get the bamboo? i have a couple of projects that it would be great for. thanks

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Home Depot and City Mill (Hawaii only)

$30-$35 a sheet of 1mm x 4’ wide x 8’ long

cut with big tin snips

do not try to sand edges after glassing.

splinters hurt like hell and edges cut skin like a razor

14

Wow bernie, if CMP is happier off the radar, he must be doing some fun stuff indeed. God knows he was doing some great work before. Hopefully he’ll be posting up to give us a little taste of what he’s working on!

Stoked to see what “Santa” has coming. Definitely need a little something to inspire, as my shaping stoke has been flagging a bit lately. I was actually thinking about that gem inquiry just a couple days ago… That was way back (waaaaay back) in the beginning for me… Funny how it all worked out, finding sways and all. Think I’ll start a thread about that…

And I don’t let the boys on the ERBB get me down, theres really not many haters there, maybe one or two. I think they’re just envious anyway. That nod from Biolos was all the props I’ll need for a looong while now.

15

Good work! Any chance of you posting pic of the bottom channel on the Gemini? I am interested in what depth, width, etc. especially around the tail area. I’ve read some stuff on their web site, but hard to get a real good idea of what’s going on under there. Thanks, Taylor.

16

Aloha Taylor!

in the valley between the twin noses the concave starts at like 1’-3/4" deep basically starts as a big upside down “U” it then tapers and spreads out to 1/2" deep around 24" in and is 1/2" all the way through the tail thinning out just a fraction as it pushes through the tail area but the concaves going right up to the rail. I can email you pictures of my board if that waht you need.

The tips of the twin noses form a slight vee down to about halfway down the nose so the water is definitely channeled into and away from the center concave. The wide point if fairly far up from middle with some pretty straight parallel rails till you hit the first bump just forward of where the front fins are located. The tail is pulled in hard from the bump there’s alot of curve back there going into a fairly narrow 4"-6" bat tail. Edges are soft (70/30?) till you hit the first bump. then sharp.

The board pumps hard off the tail (but you can actually nose ride them too) like a thruster just alot more acceleration than you’d ever expect and she comes around with that narrow tail, bumps, hard edges and four fins on a dime. More importantly at speed. If you don’t time your weighting as you pump it she’ll shoot out from under your feet, it happens to alot of first timers. All the pieces fit perfectly togethor including the SK*8 beveled deck to thin out the rails.

If you look at Stretches four fin board the tail is almost similar to the Gemini’s tail just a different bottom and nose design.

I hope that helps. Jeff has a registered patent on the design and I don’t blame him it’s a trade secret that only those willing to put up the bucks for one or make for themselves should be able to enjoy… The less I see in the water the better for me…