im making a perimeter stringered fish right now and i am having trouble bending the wood to fit the front 1/4 of the nose.
i am gluing it up using the square offcuts, but the foam is rather soft and the stiff 3/8 balsa is giving me a headache.
any tips on gluing up perimeter stringers?
my plan is to glue up the thick strips 3/4 of the way up and then laminating multiple pieces of thinner wood for the nose.
how will this effect flex, and is it an acceptable way of attaching the stringers?
Hey Tu be,
I think some have had success with a wet towel and steam iron + gorilla glue.
… or take that offcut and draw a line on some serious wood and make a serious clamp maybe.
Not sure I follow you, but here’s what I did on my one and only perimeter stringer board. I glued up one side at a time, one strip at a time of full run balsa that was 1/4" thick. Even at that thickness, it was tough to make the curve at the nose. At 3/8", it should really be tough. I was going to go three full runs of balsa, but only did two, which was a mistake, I broke the board the 3rd or 4th time out. When it’s first glued up, you’ll think there’s no way that board will ever have any flex. After taking down your rail thickness, you may feel like you’re shaping a wet noodle! Good luck, it should be a fun project, mine was.
I know this advice is a bit late in coming, but you’d probably have better luck with multiple layers of 1/8" balsa to build your rails up with. Way easier to bend around the tight curves, and by laminating multiple layers of wood, you minimize the chances of a single section of week grain causing a break when flexing.
Yeah I’m currently in the process of doing it with the 1/8th, and even this way is a PITA and waste of tape… For the first 1/4 inch I did 36 inch sheet in the middle and glued 1/8th sheets on each side to wrap the nose and tail. For the next 1/4 inch I just used all 1/8th to save the headache.
Ugly picture, but I have a glue-up cooking now. I have great luck with a bag and vac. This is 5# polyu rails, being glued to a 1.5# eps core with basswood stringers. Ala Greg L concept.
Looks nice! where’d you get 5 lb PU foam?
Hey bobmarley,
It’s pour foam from smooth-on, with red dye adding during mixing. I made a quick plug, then covered it with TAP latex mold builder, then stiffened that with veil and chopped strand mat, finally pouring the foam to get that wild shape.
what about tie bars connecting each side through the foam?
you making a delta board?!
Wakesurf
the delta is good times.
how the heck do you get up on that thing?!
Yeah, the delta has so many miles of water and there is always some place where no one else is riding.
You use a rope to get up. Not dissimilar to waterski’s or more appropriately a wakeboard.
I wanted to get a blank from Warvel but I can’t get them to give me a quote so I just made the blank myself. For hand shaping, the polyu on the rails really is a dream.
Don’t know if this is too late…
For any kind of wood bending I use a bending jig, usually made of MDF. For perimeter stringers I make the jig the same radius/template as the finished outline of the board.
I like to do a two part process for bending the wood. Steam, then lamination (if using multiple thin strips). Steaming the wood will make it bendable. After steaming for a reasonable amount of time I bend the wood over the jig and clamp it in place for 24 hours. The next day I un-clamp the wood and apply glue to each piece and then re-clamp over the same jig. After the glue is set the lamiation of those pieces will have hardly any spring back.
You can then take each rail and simply glue it onto the foam blank without having to worry about bending the tight curve in the nose around the soft foam.
Its time consuming but simple and worth it in the long run I think. Good luck.
A good resource book is The Complete Manual of Wood Bending by Lon Schleining.
The Genius
Surfore,
That stringer glue-up is impressive to say the least.
The more I see of JP’s work, the more I respect his art.
Thanks for posting those.
More? Okay…
Redwood, hd foam, balsa, hd foam, redwood tbands on rails
