D.I.Y. HWS

surfiber · December 30, 2009, 5:22pm

heya mike, welcome back!

i’m actually waiting for the next steps on your HWS build thread for a few new tricks i can use hehe " ) seriously though, i’ve collected more than enough scars on my arms-- and legs-- from building this monster of a board that was meant to be lightweight (woven plant fiber layerssss? lightweight, my assss) and the learning curve is equally worth remembering for my next plant fiber-HWS attempt (see http://www.grainsurf.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=957)

about time you uploaded more secret-special-sauce stuff to your lightweight, quick & easy rail assembly method thread here (unless it’s patent pending hehe)

cheers,

surfiber · February 7, 2010, 5:15pm

speaking of layers, here’s the area with the multiple (blame the drill!) stab wounds filled in with wood glue and repatched using the same swatches i cut out, sanding to follow :

i got a foot-wide sheet of beech veneer to cover it with, not only for cosmetic purposes but also to see if i could introduce a bowled ridge at this rocker section during glassing for noseriding. btw i also patched up the drill holes inside with cork sheet scraps from the nose deck assembly.

and here’s how i got tied up over the weekend with the first rail strip glue-up :

all those nails couldn’t keep the strip from breaking off about a foot from the nose :

not only that, a crack started showing up somewhere between the widepoint and the broken tip :

finally you may wonder how a 5-minute epoxy that’s supposed to cure & clear up within 10 minutes only got me this far over the weekend. blame the f@%$#&t expensive epoxy!! :mrgreen:

surfiber · April 25, 2010, 5:52pm

and here’s how i got tied up over the weekend gluing up the 2nd layer of rail strips :

i finally figured out how to glue up the 2nd layer with fewer nails-- shimmy, baby! :lol:

the 2nd layer bonded tighter compared to the 1st that relied on nails. i’ll have to remove the overstretched glue layer on the wingtips, reglue between the 1st layer and the board’s interior rails and tie 'em down with shims :

a single nail per strip, three cord sections and a handful of rail strip offcuts did the trick :

bonzer bottom shot shows the contrast of the rail strips in 4 colors :

haven’t decided yet what wood to use to fill up the outside gap between the deck & bottom rail strips :

with the outside layer fitted out with dark red/brown rail strips, i can either split the offcuts to come up with a light/dark sequence on both rails, or use the gold-tangerine antipolo offcuts i found in a roadside wood shop down in bicol region :

the half-trunk & limb sections in the pic above are langka (jackfruit), which i’ll use with narra to make the nose block & rail extensions.

this means getting an expert carpenter to speed it up hehe :lol:

kayu · April 27, 2010, 5:37am

Hey Fibre , langka looks like a nice wood. Is it readily available in Phils ??

surfiber · July 20, 2010, 7:42am

heya kayu, welcome back!

if you mean readily in terms of getting it anytime at any ace hardware outlet, no such luck since jackfruit trees in metro manila are mostly backyard-planted fruit species like sampaloc (tamarind), mango, santol, chico & duhat (lomboy in visayan). even if it’s illegal, homeowners here cut down trees within their property when they’re no longer useful, so it helps to know the usual neighborhood kibitzers who can point the way to free wood hehe

got that stash of langka from a roadside shop on the way back from bicol region for about P50-- less than 1 USD!

cheers,

surfiber · June 15, 2010, 7:15am

easier said than done. took me 6 weekends of scouting to find a good carpenter who had the right skills & tools to cut the nose rail sections i needed to finish the board. worth the equivalent of $10 USD he asked for for a day’s work, no regrets.

the job included splitting a 7-foot, 2" x 1/4" slat into two, trimming them flush to fit the uneven rail gaps both sides of the board. will glue this up within the week but will first need to clean up the interiors where tiny spiders have made it home, their cobwebs trapping wayward sawdust & wood shavings inside :

of the 4 antipolo sections i prepared for the entire nose rail, the 2 i messed up couldn’t be salvaged by the carpenter anymore so i offered my best piece in their place, this 2" x 14" x 12" narra block that came with the salvaged door frame that became my workbench in its next life :

tracing the board’s nose profile plus the rail width onto the narra block & sawing off the needed segment left me with a couple of pieces i could use for fins :

here the finished pieces come together : narra nose rail section with the paired antipolo extensions, and the yet-to-be-glued rail side strip :

top view shows what wood grain patterns & hues to expect when the entire nose rail assembly is finally glued up & finished :

may the next weekend be as sunny hehe

kayu · June 15, 2010, 7:28am

Hey Fibre , good to see some progress here mate , this biuld is becoming a career ! .... I could cog in with some comments , but you will learn a lot from this without my input . There is a typhoon on the way , so good luck with the weather in Manila...cheers.

surfiber · June 15, 2010, 7:48am

howdy kayu,

appreciate all inputs i can get at every stage, don’t make me say please ! hehe

btw i’ve been considering using the dowels that came with the narra block for the 3-section nose rail assembly. however the nose rail section inside the plant fiber layers is only made of cork sheet, 3/16" ply and wood glue. bad idea ?

kayu · June 15, 2010, 8:06am

Maybe , maybe not . If you got something solid to screw into , you could screw the nose blocks on (countersink holes larger than the screw heads) , and when the glue dries , take out the screws and dowel the holes (cut the dowels from a piece of same timber , so the dowel grain runs the same direction as the rail timber) , but the nose blocks need to be a perfect fit , which is very fine work and very fidley (but worth the result). It gives good pressure for glueing (as good as clamps) . Just a sugestion..good luck

surfiber · June 15, 2010, 8:20am

yeah the dowels are also narra, except i’m worried that underneath all that woven plant fiber at the nose is merely thin ply, wood glue & sheet cork, not a good foundation for screws nor dowels IMO. other than that, i could mix up some putty from sawdust & wood glue and clamp away, so that any gaps get filled in too.

is this advisable ?

surfiber · June 21, 2010, 8:14pm

thankfully the weekend was sunny enough to allow glue-up of the solid antipolo rail extensions :

to keep the glue-up from getting messy, i traced the rail width onto the inside gluing surface of the rail extensions and marked guide points on the outside, taking care not to slather too much glue within the lines. glue drip was minimal so naturally, bubble gaps appeared after overnight curing. shims kept the cords tight as before.

here the pair of antipolo extensions look like they’re different in color but they actually match, having come from the same piece of 2" x 3" offcut :

check out the water stain on the nose deck. the nose bottom looks worse, having gotten drenched 3x when the rainy season kicked off at the tail end of may. i’ll need to cover it with beech veneer if there’s no way to wash the ‘character stain’ off with a bit of hydrogen peroxide.

got too excited shaving the central rail strip, gouging off a toenail-sized area at about rail mid-point. i somehow forgot to keep the fragment so i decided to use a bit from this chunk of newly-chopped down ficus (the local balete tree, domain of unseen elementals!) that literally appeared on my doorstep as a well-cut 3.5’-long trunk from Lord knows where, a victim of its own legend, if not infamy.

its light mocha hue held interesting pinkish bands, except i’m not sure whether they’d still appear that way once the wood dries since the rail patch looked as light as popsicle-stick wood after sanding.

almost forgot i had pvc clamps back when i was gluing up the 1/4"-thick central rail strips, good thing i remembered to use them while the glue had yet to set :

shaving off the exterior face of the strip showed a lighter shade of wood. i could be mistaken but it seems to be tanguile. got the 2" W x 7’ L slat for free from jobsite crew who were segregating scraps for disposal-- including the narra doorframe that eventually became my workbench.

next weekend, the narra nose rail section glue-up : to soak or not to soak the piece overnight prior to glue-up, that is the question hmmm…

surfiber · July 19, 2010, 9:38am

with my flickr account nearing its upload limit, i skipped taking shots while gluing up the narra nose block and went ahead planing the rails topside right after :

all 6 colors of the wood rail pieces are starting to come out after planing :

the downside is, i’ll need to replace the final deck & bottom woven plant fiber layers that got ripped from all the handling hmmm

we’ll see what happens next weekend hehe

ambrose · July 19, 2010, 4:32pm

how I missed this thread till now I do not know.

I want to make a surfboard but first

I will design a new wheel award

contender ! KUDOS amigo!

the tenacity and use of available materials

ranks in the top ten!

A tribute to ingenuity you truly deserve

a set wave of merit for this effort,

…ambrose,

when reinventing the wheel

the first concern

is to eliminate the flat side.

all objects with flat sides

will not qualify as wheels.

this handmade object

will indeed someday

catch a wave.

i feel this deep

in my bone marrow.

surfiber · July 20, 2010, 3:08am

howdy ambrose,

thanks for dropping by, what an honor hehe you may want to stick around for more D.I.Y. HWS disasters this side of the pacific " )

cheers,

surfiber · July 26, 2010, 9:18am

tsk tsk i shouldn’t have said that. i rushed myself to finish the rails on sunday before dusk set in and gave myself this new disaster to hurdle :

this is about 3 feet from the nose on the right side, 5 & 1/2 inches long with the widest gash about half an inch wide by 3" long. what’s the best way to fix this?

as it is the widepoint is already 22.5", and with the yet-to-be-done rail apex featuring a flat side ranging from 1" to 1.5" wide on the board’s middle third, i can’t see myself adding another 1/4" wood strip to both sides just to cover the gouged-out area and to finish fine-tuning the rails.

so, any ideas ?

surfiber · August 9, 2010, 5:37am

save for some over-shaved sections i need to patch up and deep sanding streaks requiring finer sandpaper to make 'em disappear, it seems like the rails are done :

decided to rip out the top & bottom jute fabric layers so i could figure out how much work needs to be done to finish this baby :

this dirty ol’ bottom needs some good spanking hehe

surfiber · August 23, 2010, 9:38am

wasn’t able to do any of that over the weekend, but glued up narra e-wing blocks to match the nose rail piece :

used assorted pieces to shim up the glue-up, bound with ordinary plastic twine on its nth re-use :

plastic wrap from the laundry shop to keep off the rain, and masking tape to keep the glue off the finished rails. i decided to ‘spear’ the 1" x 1" mid-rail replacement strips right into the antipolo rail-to-nose transition pieces by 2.5" to lock them in :

rough-sanded the other side to see how the pieces blended like it was intentional right from the start :

the upcoming 3-day holiday weekend’s worth of work will be interesting hmm " )

surfiber · September 1, 2010, 9:02am

cut off the odds & ends of the tail add-ons, giving it a rough shave for next weekend’s semi-final sanding and applied putty to the remaining gaps as well :

2-toned narra tail tip in this bottom shot shows how much work still needs to be done to blend the rail curves & e-wing tips with the bonzer concaves-- using nothing but sandpaper :

the workbench ragtop pieces are the jute cloth layers i intended to use as fiberglass cloth alternative during lamination, soiled and tattered beyond use during rail shaping. next time i build a plant fiber HWS hybrid, i gotta map out a cheaper, better, faster way to assemble it before actual work begins hmm

surfiber · September 2, 2010, 8:25am

today’s bit of early-morning sanding cleaned up the deckside tail trim, leading to a “final” decision on how the e-wing outline should be cut this weekend :

wish i still had the family coping saw i used to play with as a kid hmm where’d that thing go anyway?

surfiber · September 6, 2010, 9:22am

here’s the weekend’s cleanup result :

glued up a couple of woven grass layers for a gradual flat-to-concave transition. this will be the last bottom addition prior to the final bottom layer glue-up.

top view, chiseled off the inner edge of the 2-toned narra tip for the tail end of the final woven rattan deck layer :

a little more sanding for next weekend’s session. another 3-day holiday weekend hehe " )