I waited to the last minute to look for plane tickets for my good friend Pete’s wedding. Whoops, sorry Pete. I’ll make it to your next wedding I swear. Anyway, I felt like a total jerk so I decided when he gets home from his honeymoon a new board will be waiting for him. He’s a longboarder slowly making the transition to shorter equipment. He’s usually on my borrowed fish, so he gets a new fish/hybrid. I’m reluctant to call it a true fish since its huge at 6’9"/6"10", so we’ll just call it the “Piranha”. It has lots of float but all the concaves and v of a modern fish. It’ll be nice big keels and some classic influences, resin pins and that sort of thing. 6oz bottom and 6+4 deck.
Anybody appreciating my sweet logo should know it’s copywritten and I’m lawyered up. I will however make logos for people if they want to trade for fins or whatever.
So first thing was to make a sweet template. I put the design into Aku shaper and printed out a full size template on a dozen or so pieces of paper. Taped them together and cut along the line. Here is the paper template laid out on the flexie fiber board. If you’re super cheap or lazy you could use the paper template, but I like to make my templates more permanent and more accurate. The fiber board stuff gets sanded to a smooth curve, while the paper template will have bumps and jiggles from cutting out with scissors.
I like to put the stringer slightly in from the edge of the board. This stuff gets chipped easily and now the template won’t hang up on the stringer when It’s getting in place.
Best tool for nice long smooth curves. Sandpaper on a stick. Hold it way back on the end and make nice long passes. Use your eye and hands and make that curve butter.[img_assist|nid=1051312|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=426|height=640]
I was surfing a nice big day this past winter, super early, nice and uncrowded. The biggest wave of the morning caught me inside and the lip came crashing right down on a weak spot. I had filled some deck pressure dents and they created really good hard spots. Blamo! two boards for the price of one. It was a real thin performance longboard from Guy Okazaki. I liked the shape so much I made a template from it. I cut it lengthwise to get the rocker and plan on segmenting the remaining pieces for a HWS build.
Here is a planer blade sharpening setup. It a nice flat mirror with lots of sandpaper glued on. I started with 220 and counterclockwise around the mirror the grits increase up to 1200. You start with blade flat back side and move through the grits. Then you do the same with the bevels. Move the blade left to right and Not forward and back. Take your time and get a mirror shine on those blades. There is a thread on here that explains the process in detail.
I glued the paper right along the edge of the mirror so I could run my hand along that edge to keep the movement controlled and side to side. Super 77 rocks.
The blades are now ready for surgery. This was the best thing I could have done to prepare for shaping. Sharp planers are super important. After you get that first board length wood curl, you’ll totally appreciate all the time it takes to sharpen those suckers.
On the left is the hard shell that forms on PU blanks during manufacture. When they say “skinning a blank” they’re referring to removing this hard shell. On the right is the good foam. I went at it for an hour or two with the surform and decided to go buy a power planer. Best purchase, and huge time saver. Night and day difference.
Getting the bottom and rocker all worked out before I cut the outline. The strongest foam is closest to the outside of the blank. So you want to plane the bottom to get the thickness down to the right amount for your shape. Try to take just the minimum amount of foam off the deck so the strength of the foam is retained on the deck to prevent heel dents, elbow dents, cranial dents, etc.
