the entire build thread holds the answer to your question, especially the one posted on sept. 23 hehe.
beginning mid-july, the assembly stages recorded here actually veered away from my original plan, which was to do away with rail shaping altogether (as i have no power tools nor prior shaping experience) by using my raw material-- woven plant fiber sheets-- to wrap around the ply ribs’ rail curves, kept in place with glue & sealant.
until i reached that point, i didn’t realize that i’d been using the wrong adhesives on my material, and that the resulting weight of multiple layers of woven plant fiber laminated together with glue & sealant was going to be far heavier than if i had used classic-HWS wood strips or ply to begin with.
my wrong choice of adhesives (various types & brands of wood glue) caused the primary woven plant fiber layer to simultaneously sag & pucker up instead of laying down taut & smooth. to correct that, i had to add a ply layer ondeck and wood filler all around the rails to clean up the deck-to-rail transition. in all, enough raw material to build 2 boards. the ribs are spaced 8" apart so with the ply-reinforced deck i think it’s gonna hold up. i’ll be adding a couple more woven plant fiber layers on top & bottom before i glue up the 1" x 1" solid wood rail strips-- in 4 bookmatched colors!
btw no bamboo was used in this board, only woven rattan, raffia & grass.
any suggestion where the e-wing rails should end up? 2/3 of the way down or right at the point where the twin concaves start to flare out?
Hey Fiber, how about laminating woven plant fibre in multiple layers, to make a solid slab of woven plant fibre 3" thick ! Maybe you wouldn't need wooden rails , just go full-tilt with woven plant fibre and shape it like foam !!! Then you could shape the e-wing rails from fibre . It may be a bit heavy........just make the next one lighter ! Your enthusiasm is amazing.....every time you make a mistake, you get happier and more enthusiastic hehe!.......don't ever lose that ! .............hehe!
thanks hmmm IMHO no true pinoy ‘pobre hombre’ would be caught dead without a sense of humor & genuine pragmatism in the teeth of guaranteed disaster hehe
as to gluing up a solid slab of plant fiber to whittle into shape, structural soundness might be an issue-- unless this is for the rails i need to make. however i already bought the 1" x 1" x 10’ bookmatched wood strips, and the woven plant fiber sheets i have left would not suffice for this purpose. the strips are red & white laua-an, tanguile and an unidentified local light creamy wood variety. but that’ll come after the next couple of deck & bottom sheets get glued down this weekend
Hey Surfiber! I finally figured out the hehe thing and why it gets me. When I was a kid I used to watch the Prescious Pupp cartoons and everytime that dog bit some one thats what it did hehe !! Im trying to find some of those cartoons on the internet.
thanks for the (belated) welcome to sways hehe the board’s nearly a year old, hopefully it’ll be done within the year while it’s still surf season up north, some 7 hrs from the city
awww shouldn’t have said that hmmm the glue-up i wanted to do over the weekend got seriously eff’d up.
poured 3 bottles of contact cement (1.2kg!) on deck but forgot to seal it beforehand with roof sealant. the 2 layers of woven raffia just soaked it all up and totally ignored the final woven rattan layer it was meant for. the next day i went out to get a kilo of stikwell, local carpenters’ preferred wood glue for parquetry, and coated the deck. dang roof sealant-coated rattan sheet wouldn’t stick, so i pulled it off and coated the underside as well, reapplying it on deck but couldn’t get it centered right, so i had to trim the rail overlaps to make it look like i had done it right the first time. here’s how it finally looked :
it got too dark to take pics but i’d also been able to glue down a sheet of woven jute fiber that came with a protective plastic ‘cover’. hopefully bleached jute fabric can replace fiberglass cloth as it contains, according to wikipedia, “…both cellulose (major component of plant fibre) and lignin (major component of wood fibre). It is thus a ligno-cellulosic fibre that is partially a textile fibre and partially wood.” the deck should stay clean prior to glassing with the plastic sheet on top, but i’d have to cover it with book paper to keep it from getting ripped while i’m adding rail strips next weekend.
at this stage things went sputtering along quite nicely if i may say so hehe here's the last woven plant fiber bottom layer glue-up before i start doing the rails :
that coil of woven plant fiber piping material on the side is reserved for deck trim, haven't figured yet how to make it look integral to the board instead of looking extraneously fancy :
they should bend well enough to follow the rocker while sticking to the 3/16" ply rail strip gluing platform hidden under 7 layers (gulp) of wraparound woven plant fiber:
[quote="$1"]
[i]gotta weigh this monster before adding the rails next weekend[/i]..
[/quote]
this monstrosity weighed 14kg and the 10’ rail strips, 4.75kg.
considering i had yet to add those rails, 3/16" ply rail finishing strips (1 per side) and a nose block, i wasn’t too keen on having a final (glassed) weight of about 18-19kg— 20kg at worst.
this detour into rail chambering was my only option :
all the rail filler material i added at every step turned out to be 2" deep at some sections, hence the resulting weight :
made sure to review the tail block plans before drilling to avoid punching through the solid pine concaves :
a year ago that diagram looked this fresh :
not watching the drill angle gave me a few bottom holes to patch up :
you gotta be a masochist to enjoy going through this hehe
Hey Surfiber! Man, I'm just going through this thread again and really digging all of the stuff this board has been through. This is the antithesis to that 40 minute surfboard thread that passed through a few days ago. No offense to production shapers, but how can an person really care about or even recall a board that took 40min to shape? I'll bet you've got a few memories tied to this board and its layers - No? Just to see it coming together without power tools is cool enough. Keep it coming SF, we're rooting for ya'!
