I’m coming down the home stretch of a balsa fish build and will post pictures in a week or so. Shaping balsa will certainly advance your shaping skills.
All the best
Absolulty Right. If you want the shaped board to be refined;(rails, rocker etc.) you are best off to use the "Cali. Method " as Reverb referred to it. Pre-shape, break it apart and then re-glue and fine tune the shaping. This is the primary reason that several years back guys who were using a “sandwich” construcin method added Balsa stripped rails. the technique allowed for a more finely tuned rail. Lowel
That’s fantastic Kayu! Kind of an honor to even be allowed to get your hands on something like that huh?
Thank you so far for all the replies!
But I want to build my own blank with an approved rocker. Don’t want to buy an ecudorian blank.
So I still need some advice on dimensions and distances for the ribs.
As stated above, search the archives for build threads, particularly Balsa Bill. Good luck.
now I have the ultimate idea for the future of swaylocks: make it a static site and just say it’s all in the archive. With a slight but very annoying problem: there are destroyed links in the archive threads, so have fun and enjoy yourself to find what you are after…
Here’s something I saw on Mike Casey’s website. Mike is a master shaper here on Oahu. He’s been making wood boards for a while.
I don’t have easy access to long balsa planks, so I did this with a variety of balsa from 1/2" thick x 48" x 4" to thin 1/8" x 18" x 3" strips. I made 2 - 1" thick stringers, gluing 1/2" thick pieces to get to 7’. I have 1/4" ribs about every 4" to build the skeleton, then covered it with opposing layers of 1/8" thick balsa. I made a rocker table to hold it while I worked on the board. I think I spent 2 months working on it on and off while I was recovering from 4 way bypass surgery. This one is more of a wall hanger I did for my brother, but I also did one about 6 - 6 using 3 stringers and I surfed it twice.
This was the first thread I read and this one was one of the inspirations for building a balsa board!!
But there are no hints concerning the dimension of decks&bottom-plank etc. Espcallialy if you want to go with the rib&plank method…
And the two posted links from LeeV and cmd are dead.
So I’m still happy of all hints I can get.
Thak you very much sharkcountry, the board looks great!!
How many layers did you use for deck & bottom plywood? Any layers of glass under the balsa skin?
I was told by an OG in Pavones that back in the day (70s) when balsa was is use, moreso than today I guess, the boards were hollowed out to pack with white powder. He did not mention how well they surfed but he had a nice compound 40 years later. So maybe the SA technique is different than the Cali for these reasons.
By the way, balsa is a fast growing tree from the rain forests of the American tropics and can grow to over 100 feet tall in about 30 years. These trees are MASSIVE and cause a lot of destruction to the forest when they fall. I have been part of the logging of one of these giants. In my opinion, cutting a balsa for a surfboard is a horrbile trade off. From the time it is cut, then transported to the mill, then chopped, then sent north, transported to the lumber yard, then sured up, then to your shaping bay and worked again is a rediculous amount of energy spent, which should be taken into consideration, consciously.
AndiHL, I used 2 layers balsa. I don’t remember how thick they were, but I’d go with at least 3/8" to 1/2" in thickness if I do it again for a board to ride. I think the first board I did has 3/8" total. For ribs using all balsa for the skeleton, I went with 3 stringers of 1/4", and 1/4" ribs every 4" for the first board. The top of the ribs were shaped to make a profiled deck.
I basically took the standard hollow wood skeleton design that most guys are using, and beefed it up with more stringers and ribs. The rails are at least 1/2" of wood in layers, but on the first board I used 1" of XPS (Dow blue styrofoam) for the rails. If you can draw out an outline and a rocker, you can make a skeleton. Use the same rocker you draw out to make a rocker table to work on.
Some ideas for rail bands… I’ve used 1/4" thick x 12" x 12" cork tiles and cut them up to sandwich between balsa to make thicker rails faster. I’ve used 4’ x 2’ x 1/8" cork rolls to do the same. Both of these were from a local art store, but Home Depot, or Lowes should have cork tiles. Thinner cork with more layers of balsa look nice. I’ve also used just cork to build rails, thinking that they would be more water proof when dinged, same reason I used XPS foam. XPS shapes out nicely, so we do that on the compsands.
I also mix up the way the short pieces of balsa are set to get the length I need. 45 degrees across the board seems to be nice and the overlapping ends help to keep it from having a single line and less waste. The most economical way is straight up and down, nose to tail.
I got most of my balsa from a widow who wanted to get rid of a huge stash of wood her husband had. He made beautiful remote control model airplanes. Some were about 8’ across. I got 2 car loads of wood in every possible size. I also got wood from Lone Star Balsa before they went out of business. Check out National Balsa or Solarbo for wood. Solarbo was selling blocks you could use for surfboards at one time. I haven’t been to either site for a while.
Having a hard time finding all the photos I’ve saved, but I got these of the first hollow board I did. I had started with a simple skeleton frame, then added 2 more stringers and ribs every 4". The I added a tin bottom skin and stopped. The board sat for a long time, then I took it out from under a bunch of crap and reshaped it because the skeleton was damaged, and finished it. The final board has a cloth inlay on the bottom.
Thank you so much for these detailed informations!
Piteraman , it’s quite rare these days to use natural stands of balsa…it’s predominantly grown these days , in sustainable plantations…and the quality is much better than the trees dropped in rainforests , which tend to be heavier because of their age , and have a lot of blue stain and fungus in the wood.
AndiHL, sorry, I think you are in Europe not the US. The things we have available are going to be different from what you’d be able to get. One thing I was able to get there in Hawaii is a soft light wood we call Wiliwili (Erythrina sandwicensis), some people call it Hawaiian Balsa. There’s probably something where you live that is similar in weight and strength. Of course we have access to model airplane Balsa through the Web, but it is only 3’ to 4’ long max.
Yes, I’m in Europe. But I also have only easy access to model airplane balsa. Other balsa is hard to get. Often, you have to buy a complete tree trunk, more or less. That’s one of the cause to go with the rib and plank method.
AndiHL, I found these images of the second hollow balsa I made. This is all from model airplanes balsa. Now I remember that I made the ribs with single short pieces that were profiled for the outer section and 2 flat pieces for the top and bottom of the middle section. I added tiny pieces to help add strength where the ribs met the stringers. The 1st layer of skins are 1/4" pieces and they were layed down with the bricks, the second layer is only 1/8" and layed out for asthetics. It was vacumm bagged on.
