First time building a balsa blank...Help!

Hi, i live in San Diego California and i want to get started building a balsa blank, i am somewhat of an experienced craftsman but i have never shaped a surfboard no knowlege on the subject. a few questions,

  • is Balsa as boyant as foam is?
  • is it possible to make a functional balsa board thats in the 6 foot range thats good for tricks?
  • could you use the same design from a foam template for a balsa board?
  • when first building the blank, what types of joints work best? (toung and groove, Dowels, ect.)
  • what types of tools do you use for shaping the blank, and are they the same ones used for shaping a foam board?
  • dose anyone have any plans they are willing to share?

Thanks, any help is welcome.

TheAustinWilliams@Yahoo.com

also, is there a wood more boyant than balsa is?

i seem to remember some sort some wood lighter than balsa, but i didnt find it online. Kiln dried end grain? balsa varies from 0.09 to 0.22 g/cc. Cork is about 0.24 g/cc, basswood is light too at about 0.32. All variable depending on moisture content, age, heartwood, sapwood. etc.

There are fantastic descriptions of building solid and hollow wooden boards in the archives. Just to whet your appetite, one of the masters wrote about gluing up the board, shaping it, and then grabbing it by the tail and whacking it on the ground over and over until it breaks up into all its separate planks. Can you imagine the neighbors watching you doing this out on the street? All their suspicions would be confirmed. Then you bore away the wood you dont want and glue it back together a few pounds lighter.

Archives.

In the meantime, you need to realize that you are getting into a heavy subject (no pun intended).

Bouyancy of a given volume of material has to do with its’ density. The lighter the balsa, the more bouyant. Foam is almost always more bouyant. When you select your woods from Frost (or the like) choose the lightest. The good pieces tend to have a pinkish hue, the heavy ones tend to have a greyish color and lots of little birdseyes.

On Oahu, there is a crew of surfers using balsa for their shortboards. The designs are virtually identical to the foam boards.

To get your board lighter you may want to “chamber” your balsa. You could also build using planking techniques. For a first board you are better-off getting the most out of your 4x4 logs by assembling them into a blank and rough shaping it, then disassembling the logs and hollowing them out (crosswise, elliptical holes, staggered). Your biggest problem will be dealing with the relatively abrupt nose kick but there are ways to lap join, kerf, plank to get around this.

If you have access to a decent, but sacrificial, “goal board” that you could buy used and cut into sections then you can hand build each log to create the “goal” equivalent.

The joining of the logs is best done with epoxy or a catalyzed waterproof wood glue. Butt-gluing is normal as the main component of strength is the glass job after shaping the balsa blank.

The shaping is done with the same tools, but the increased use of the power planer is encouraged.

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Hi, i live in San Diego California and i want to get started building a balsa blank, i am somewhat of an experienced craftsman but i have never shaped a surfboard no knowlege on the subject. a few questions,

  • is Balsa as boyant as foam is?

Buoyancy is a combination of weight and displacement.

Two vessels will have the same buoyancy if they are the same displacement and weight. For example, if you were to place two identical Tupperware bowls in water and fill one with 6 oz. of lead and the other with 6 oz. of feathers they would displace the same amount of water. If you add 6 oz. more material to one of the bowls, the water line would then change. The water surrounding the bowls doesn’t care what’s inside the bowls. With two objects of exactly the same displacement, it is their difference in weight that affects the floatation.

Let’s say you were sitting in a boat in a pool with a large rock inside of the boat and you were to toss the rock out of the boat into the pool. The boat now sits higher on the water and the water level of the pool lowers. When placing the rock which has little displacement into the pool, it lowers the pool’s water line because the rock displaces only its volume, not the boat’s. While the weight of the rock was in the boat the rock displaced its total weight, so the boat displaced much more water, raising the level of the pool’s water line.

Archimedes Principle: Any object, wholly or partly immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.

couldn’t you just drill holes in the balsa before gluing it up?

balsa is heavier. comparable supposedly to the foam they originally used for boards.too bad the ecuadorians stoped shipping in coke with the balsa, my friend in customs used to be able to pick up big 4x4 pieces on the docks in nyc all the time. but archives would be a good place to look also if you can contact anyof the really old board shapers from the early 60’s and late 50’s. keep in mind balsa is harder to work with than foam and drilling balsa can burr the wood. you are gonna want to use draw knives hand planes and sure forms a bit more than you other wise wood. o yater would be a good person to contact.

i was looking in the archives and retroman started up “Making your own balsa board blank” and i really liked the simplicty of his design, but he was building a fish, i have never rode a fish, dose any one know how a fish rides? im looking to build somewhat of a trick board in the six foot range, so if any one can sudguest any styles, that would be great.

fish ride like butter fast forgiving you can easily paddleinto a wave early, they have sufficent volume even if the bord is 5foot 8.