Had a 3x3 by 8’ piece of balsa laying around and a block of EPS a friend gave me a couple years ago. Finally got after it with a hotwire that got passed down to me by some sailboarders that quit making styro boards. Anyways, decided to do balsa rails ala firewire. Actually, I was more inspired by Drewtang’s parabolic stringer/hi-dense foam boards he posted up a while back. Didn’t turn out exactly as envisioned, as the balsa shaped a little differently than I thought it would. Glued the stringers on one at a time using PU glue and lots of tape for clamping. For my outside stringer/rail bands, I clamped with the rocker template I used for the hotwire with screws that were countersunk into the inside of the template and screwed into wedge blocks for clamping with pipe clamps. Didn’t take pictures of the glue-up process, but suffice it to say, I wouldn’t do it again unless it was for me. Too time consuming to try to make money at it! Overall I’m pretty stoked, the nose rail got a little too much taken off of the outline on one side trying to smooth a weird bump, but it’s livable. Here’s some pics:
rail view from tail:
tail with FCS “bisuits” routed in and spackled prior to glassing:
Janklow, thanks, yep it was a nice day, the guys at FCS sent me a bunch of the biscuits with my fin/plug set. Probably enough for 3 or 4 boards, no charge.
llilibel03,thanks,The board is 6-4 by 20 wide (widepoint at center), 15" T, 12" N and about 2.25" thick. I’m older and fatter than I used to be, so a little more volume helps. The shape was inspired by a Greg Griffin 5 fin he posted up either here or at Surfer mag’s website. I first cut it out to a little bigger dims as I was going to do 3/4" rails, but when I cut the 3/4" off the outline, it looked so good at 19" wide, I didn’t wanna go back to 20.5" wide again, so I compromised and only used 1/2" balsa rails.
Funny this thread came back up. Here’s the latest:
Don’t know if I can blame the construction as much as I can blame doing an off the lip and landing in knee-deep water! My pup sure looks guilty though, doesn’t she?
Technically speaking (which I rarely do) all laminated multi-ply boards are “sandwich” construction. But, yeah, I know what you meant. My idea on that board wasn’t to make it look like a compsand as much as just to try a really light board with perimeter, parabolic, pair-a-bows, etc. stringers. The board went unreal! I liked it fine, I think I could have broken just about any type construction doing what I did to that one though. 190+ lbs straight into less than knee deep water is a bad combo for any board.