Board Number Two Started

Board number one took me six months to complete! This time around there are several factors that should drastically speed up my production: I am starting from a pre-shaped blank (rather than a block of insulation foam), I am using powertools, and my family is away on vacation. I hope to finish at least one board in the next two weeks, working only in the evening after my day job. If it goes faster than expected than I have materials ready to make more boards. We'll see...

Last time I created an enourmous amount of dust, and then our landlord happened to have a gardener come with a leafblower, who proceeded to blow all the dust over to our neighbour! The next day the neighbor complained that I was polluting her vegetable garden... This time I will do most of the shaping with the planer, and the dust is collected with a shop vac, hopefully my neighbour will be all smiles.


The first board will be a 6.5 x 19 " shortboard. In the 2nd picture you see the blank after I marked the template and cut the outline with a saw. The blank has 5" nose rocker and 2 1/8" tail rocker, and that's about what I want. So no rocker modification needed, which will simplify the shaping.

The next steps are mowing down the foam to desired thickness, and shaping the rails. To get accurate thickness measurements this time, I spent this morning creating the very high tech tool in the 3rd picture, following drawings in the incredible useful surfboard construction pdf that you can find at swaylocks.com.

That's it for today. More pics coming as the shaping progresses.