what types of wood can/should be used for wooden tailblocks? where do you guys score your wood from?
i tried looking it up in the search and everything leads to a dead end with the new format so sorry if this has been asked before.
jd
Scrap stringer wood, for dark wood. Redwood, Cedar. For thin white wood, paint stir sticks, any thin wood stock. Reclaimed wood. Redwood fence material, as well as lath material. For exotic wood, the cutoff bins at lumber yards. Frost Lumber comes to mind, here in San Diego. Be creative. Don't forget High School wood shops, for scraps.
haha…funny you mention that thrail. my dad was a shop teacher for 30+ years who is retired now. can't tell you how many times i've regretted having all those tools and supplies at my disposal and not taking advantage of it…ahhhhh well.
jd
Anybody ever do one out of skateboards? Stacking a few with colored laminates would probably look cool. It's definitely been done before. I'll have to try it once. Make it thick enough so you could extract a square piece, free of concave and other bends.
Pretty much everything works for wood, I picked up some great scraps at the shop of a friend who's a luther.
One thing I highly recommend is sealing your wood (prep with acetone, then baste it with a slightly thinned batch of lam resin, when that sets up pretty well you're good to go). One, it'll cut way down on bubbles. Two, it'll help from eventual delam on tight grained or oily woods.
Something that I used to do sometimes was to use colored paper as really thin boundary lines between woods or between layers of foam. A nice way to get a little variety going. White glue works well for that.
Some day I'll have to get out some of my tailblock shots from long ago. They're fun.
IMO nose and tailblocks on longboards should be solid glass, not wood. They'll take way more abuse and you don't have to worry about wood rot if compromised.
At Jim Phillips' place, we would use fin sheet scraps glued together with colored resin to get an accent line. I always thought the tint sheets made the best looking tailblocks as they would light up in the sun, but another one of my favorites was your basic chrome yellow and black opaque, alternating to get a bumblebee effect.
When I rehab an old longboard with severe tail damage, I usually do a combo tailblock of wood and glass layers with the last layer being glass. Doing the last layer with glass helps avoid rot when the tail eventually gets dinged, again. I also use scrap cuts from fin panels that I have laying around. The last one I did was on an old Gordie. I did layers of clear, red, and black glass, alternating with mahogany. I had pics of the work, but they were lost in a hard drive death. A couple of years after I did the repair, the same board showed up on ebay. The seller lied about the board.
Nice woodworkers next door. Their trash is my treasure…
Lots of Mohagany, Cedar, Oak, Redwood, Maple, Every once in a while… something exotic comes through…
I actually have a bunch of scraps on our roof… getting weathered. Getting that reclaimed look.