Hi There, I’m a new board builder. After hours of research, planning and gathering materials I’m finally rolling. I built my first EPS blank, cut the outline, squared the rails and foiled the rocker and I’m ready to start the serious shaping. I drew up a couple designes in Shape3dX Lite and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to take the designs from the software to the blank. I would like to be able to mark railband guide points and draw railbands on the board (as described in Greenlight’s building guide), but I’m not sure how to get those measurements from the Shape3d software. If anyone has more experiance with Shape3d and can help me figure this out, I would greatly appreciate it.
You can add slices and then look at each slice and read off measurements for your rails.
Mark the measures on your blank and loft the curve.
Even in the licensed version I can’t think of an easier way to get these measures. Maybe someone else has another way.
EDIT:
But if you’re not experience with S3D, it may be better to manually lay out your rails, rather than taking measures from the software. It’s too easy to have wobbles and things in a computer model that you don’t pick up on screen and to design rails that look OK on screen but are too hard or soft to glass and sand to the desired effect. Even after doing 20 or more on my machine I still get better results turning the rails by hand.
If you work slavishly to the computer measures you may transfer problems to your blank (although you should pick up any wobbles when trying to “join the dots”). Ask Sways for undertuck measures and rail band advice and I’m sure the community will help you with good numbers.
I don’t think Shape3D has a button for ‘Greenlight Rail Band Chart’ either.
You could try to reverse engineer a chart by printing out the three slices (nose, middle, tail) that you want to use as data, full-size.
Go after the plots with a pencil and ruler and determine where your bands could be for removing material yet allowing a little safety margin for blending and sanding. Make them look like the Greenlight chart but designed for your specific board.
It’s just an approximation, so approximate. Better to error on the side of keeping foam on the board than to whack too much off. If you have scraps you could make practice pieces of your bands and your desired rail shapes.
Lately I have been interested in Dave Daum’s bottom indexed rail bands and how to hot wire cut that from EPS since I make thick boards. If you are doing thinner boards that will not make any sense.
Or…
Tell Sways more about the board (type, length, widths and thicknesses, contours, pictures) to solicit more of a ‘do x,y,z’ answer like Red mentioned.
Hi guys, thanks for the responses. I like both of your ideas and think either one will work. I really like red_boards idea of using standard rail band marks and cutting the rails off those, that’s something I was thinking about doing. Greenlight has a good set of rail band measurements for different types of rails with a calculator to customize the numbers based on the thickness of your board. I’ll probably go that route.
I’m working on a wakesurf board that will be 4’9" long, 22" wide and 1 3/4" thick. It will have a hard bottom rail for it’s entire length like most surf/skim hybrid boards. If it works, Here is a picture of the blank I cut.
