Thanks to everybody who have gotten my understanding to the point where I feel that I can start my board. I hope this board turns out to be a multipurpose funboard that works well in typical So Cal small stuff. I moved the wide point behind center (to hopefully get a board that I can get a little aggressive with). I’m going with balsa rails and skins and vacuuming it together.
It would be really helpfull if you could look over my board. I’ve included a JPG and an APS3000 file (I don’t know which would be easier. Sometimes its easier to show rather than describe). I’ve pieced together different features that appealed to me and drew heavily from one of Bert’s boards (the outline - I hope you don’t mind). I’m decent at building things, but many of the finer points of board build still elude me.
I plan to take my time (its taken me three months to get to this point) making this board so updates will be rather sporatic.
It looks like it’ll do what you want. I love the volume in beers conversion! How big is it in 22oz Sapporos?
Edit: sorry, got distracted thinking about beers. If you’re bending on strips of balsa for rails, the curves are the hardest part. A pointed nose & a tail block might be a lot less frustrating than the double-ender you’ve got here. A square tail will also catch that mush easier & turn easier. And tailblocks are easy to make and look nice too. Or, if you widen the nose a little and make the front 60% less curvy all the way from those hips to the nose, you can add nose blocks and skip the bend up there even with the round nose and you might even be able to noseride it a little…
I was planning on adding nose and tail blocks. I agreee, they look really good and I’ll take anything that makes bending the rails easier. I just cut out the template in paper to see what it looked like, Its narrower than I expected (who said pictures don’t lie). Thanks, I definately need help in the design department.
I found it was a lot easier to hold the rail pieces in place with the noseblock already on. So I made the nose block as wide as the rails would be after they were fully built. And, the way the ends of the block pieces make an angle to the rail rather than a square joint helps hold them in too. Then you just trim the end of your balsa rail pieces to an angle that fits right in there under the block. You don’t need to get crazy for that triming, either, a utility knife is fine.
Thats a good tip on applying the blocks first. What did you make your blocks out of? Did you attatch them with epoxy? The peer pressure (you. Oneula, Bert) is causing me to rethink preforming the rails. I layed my template on top of my current boards and somehow it made the template look a lot better.
The blocks were just whatever scrap wood was near the saw. I think they were bass & mangeris. Whatever you use, make sure they’re all hard or all soft. If you mix hard & soft, when you’re shaping & sanding the soft ones will go away faster & your block will end up scalloped. Bass looks just like balsa & is pretty light but is much harder. You can also mix balsa & redwood or cedar without much penalty.
An eigth foot long board thats 3" thich…I would feel too “high” up riding and like theres too much board even if it was only for small stuff that you wouldn’t duck dive. If you’ve surfed for awhile you prob know what u want though, jsut my two cents
I did think about thinning it out, but I wanted the paddle power. I normally surf a 9 footer and I like catching waves early. On a side note, I have changed the outline shape a bit. There was something ab out the shape that just didn’t look right.
