There are a few stages I havent included cause the pics are not available at the moment; Hot wire, machining profiling, hand shaping the squared of rails and concave.
The squaring off the rails was finished with a surform and sanding block.
The western red cedar has come out of my house, and still has a date with my thicknesser before I get ready to cut them to shape and laminate them on.
I have some 2mm ply that may become the skins if i can’t be patient enough to make up skins from the western red cedar.
How the heck do you manage cutting the thickness on your bandsaw like that?! No fence or jig? Are you simply eyeballing the whole deal or what?
Where do you live? I have a thickness planer. I also have a bandsaw but I haven’t had much luck cutting thickness from a plank… even with a jig. I’m a klutz with a bandsaw.
got inspired and shaped a blank from scratch to be the same but just straight foam and epoxy, also maged to machine the cedar for the rail strips today.
FWIW - here is how I do my cedar strip compsand deck skin inlays…
First I gather a bunch of strips of appropriate length, then run them though the thickness planer to adequate thickness (it won’t be as thin as veneer - maybe closer to 1/8".) Then I lay the pieces together on a table and tape all the seams before flipping over, laminating a sheet of fiberglass to what will become the inside, and vacuum it down to a vacuum table. On this board I ended up cutting an outline to fit recessed just inside the parabolic stringers. It was a good fit but it took some fiddling. I slapped the shit out of the deck foam with a bunch of nails pounded through a strip of wood. (poor man’s ‘3D glassing’ - HA) Then applied some slightly thickened epoxy to the roughened up inner glass on the panel before placing the panel down on the deck and vacuuming in place. I also masked off around the outer part of the parabolic stringers to catch most of the goo that got squeezed out. A simple block plane, a surform and sanding block helped clean up the edges before the deck glassing began. The bottom had already been glassed with a slight overlap on to the wood. The overlap got sanded down a bit and the deck was glassed to overlap on to the bottom.
That gets you to a ‘normal’ laminated board. Fillcoat, sanding, glossing, etc are per normal.
oops i forgot the start of the rail strips for the comp sand version, but i dont have a pic of it. but i think i have sorted a way to make twice the number of them.
the pdf of the gearbox did not print out to scale and after spending quite a while shaping them in profile then thiscknes i routed out the hole in the eps, ent to pop it in and its about 3mm small in length.its like th epdf printed at 95% or something.
Bit of progress and a big stuff up. Fixable and lucky i was planning a fabric inlay over the fin patch anyway…
So i scored so free Hd foam
Marked out from the boxes, made an afternoon of hand shaping them.
Then got to routing out the holes, and STUFFED UP, i had one marking out mistake where i had put a line in half an inch too close to the middle, (stupid inches), and of course in ultimate retard fasion i routed out to the wrong line…
But i have the Hd inserts glued in and a foam insert to shape and glue in and shape down before i can glass
I did get a little block of eps the other day… enough to tide me over for a few board projects i think;)
It happens. My last board has one of those fin box routing repairs, the jig slipped and instead of stopping I just kept routing. I used clear epoxy and EPS for the repair, the white HD inserts from Gearbox, and white tinted resin to set the boxes. The top of the board had been glassed in anticiaption of veneer so my routing slip nicked the cutlap and my dorky, too heavy pencil line for the cutlap. If it were not for the missing glass and pencil line the repair would have been pretty hard to see. Looking forward to seeing the rest of the build. -J
