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.

More Color

I did a another testpanel with pigmented epoxy. Both pictures show the same panel, 2 layers of 6-ounce s-glass on top of styrofoam. The pigments used here are the same as in the previous post, but this time I used much lower concentration, and I also mixed pigements to create new colors. I like these colors much better than the ones in my previous post! But due to the lower pigment concentration, all these colors came out semi-transparent, and you can clearly see the grains of the styrofoam under the laminate.

From left to right in the bottom picture: Diluted ocre gave a real nice yellow, ocre and burnt sienna mixed gave a warm orange. Ocre and aquamarine mixed gave sea green. The fourth panel is a low concentration of aquamarine blue by itself, and the last panel is yellow ocre mixed with venitian red. I like these colors, and I think my favorite is the orange. I think I'm ready to do a whole board now, which color do you think I should use?

Surfboards Love Color

I laminated some test-panels with tinted epoxy. I mixed up 1 1/2 ounces of epoxy, divided it into five smaller batches, and added pigment to each batch. The colors (from left to right) are: Burnt Sienna, Sienna, Yellow Ocre, Venitian Red, Ultramarine Blue.

I then laminated two test-panels that show the colors in the same order. Both panels have two layers of 6 oz s-glass. The first panel was EPS packaging foam.


The second test panel is polyiso insulation foam, sanded smooth to 100 grit.

The EPS test panel is clouded and muddy. That's just because I didn't clean my squeeque between each pass over the panel. For the polyiso panel, which I did second, I improved my technique, and it looks a lot cleaner - try clicking on the pictures to see a closeup. Good thing I practiced on some panels, before tinting a whole baord!

Note that in the blue and red areas, the small irregularities in the EPS foam surface are visible as dark specks. The sanded polyiso panel on the right looks much smoother. I guess this is why these colors are considered hard for resin tints. Yellow seems to show the imperfections in the foam much less. It makes sense that it's the color usually recommended for a first tint job.

I also tried swirling the colors together a bit. That mostly resulted in a brownish mess, with expeption of the blue, which I had poured first.



So I'll stay away from swirls for now... The colors on the polyiso panel came out much brighter and nicer than I had hoped for, I'm very happy with them. I chose these particular colors because they contain non-toxic pigments. I plan to do one more test where I mix yellow+blue to get green, and yellow+red to get orange. That's because almost all green and orange pigments you can buy off the shelf are toxic.

P.S: I stole the title for this post from the following wegpage: http://surfboardlove.blogspot.com/ check it out for some amazing colorwork!

Continuing Education: Blanks and Planer

This will be a fun summer! I just bought my very first set of surfboard blanks, which I hope to turn into finished boards in the next months. I hope it'll be a lot less work than my insulation-foam-fish project... These blanks are all from Surfblanks America, from left to right: 6'8 shortboard blank, 7'8 shortboard/gun blank, and 6'8 fish blank. I hope to turn these into a thick and wide shortboard for smaller days, a solid gun for big Ocean Beach, and... the fish blank will be used for something experimental. Maybe a hull. I also want to experiment with color this time, I can't wait!!!

The blank distributor was a real friendly guy. He showed me his shop, including his new shaping room and computerized shaping machine. He strongly encouraged me to buy a planer, to save myself a lot of work with the shaping. I had always thought I would need to fork out $500+ for a refurbished Clark Planer, but after a bit of research on Swaylocks.com, I found that cheaper alternatives can work well. Also there are simple ways to connect a shop vac to the exhaust of the planer, to avoid all the foam dust. Which is good for me - the neighbour already complained when I hand shaped the first board. So I went out and bought a planer and shop vac today, very reasonably priced.

Just thinking about the planer makes me smile! It feel like I came to a fork in the road and made a decision that will influence my future in a significant and good way. My education as a backyard shaper is beginning.

p.S: I've had the insulation-foam-fish out twice since the repair, and so far it has held up, no more cracking in the deck.

Board #1 is done - again!

I finally had time to fix the crack in the bamboo glass on the deck of board #1. First I consulted with the experts on swaylocks.com, which had different opinions about what could have gone wrong: one felt that polyiso foam was generally unsuitable for surfboards and that I should just trash the board (unthinkable after having put this much work into it!), another thought the deck lamination was too light, and another wrote that bamboo glass can be weak unless it is stretched just the right amount - stretch too little and the lam will be brittle - stretch too much and there'll be too little fiber. In the end I decided to route out a layer of foam around the crack, glued in a block of fresh foam with Gorilla Glue, sanded it level, and laminated over with two patches of bamboo glass.

At this point the ding was fixed, but the glue had left some nasty brown rings in the foam. It occurred to me that this was an excellent chance to add another logo to the board. You can see the result in the picture. Again I printed it on rice paper, and covered it with a 4-ounce e-glass patch.


Then, to make the board bullet-proof and hopefully avoid further cracks in the deck, I laminated a thick (2 layers of 6-ounce S-glass) patch over 2/3rd of the deck. If you click on the photo an view the closeup then you can see a reflection where the patch ends. I forget how much resin this took.

Then I faired out the patch and sanded the whole deck with #36, #60, and #100 grit sandpaper, then hotcoated the deck again (12 ounces of resin). This time I used a real wide brush which made the hotcoating real quick and easy. I few little things went wrong: Unfortunately I didn't have enough fast epoxy hardener left, so I had to use a mix of slow and hard, and it took many hours to cure the hotcoat - way too long. By that time plenty of dust had attached to the surface. I washed off the deck the next day - but the epoxy must have still been slightly tacky - after washing and drying the shine in the hoatcoat was gone. O well, I can do better on the next board... after waxing it won't really make a difference.

The board is a lot heavier now, but feels real solid. Like a tank.

So at this point the board is ready to ride again. The above happened two weeks ago, and the board has been curing away in the basement since then, while I've been travelling for work. I'm writing this from my hotel room, the day before flying back home. I can't wait to try the board real soon!

More pictures of the quad fish

Here are some more pictures. I've noticed that surfboard photos taken up close, such as the one with me standing, or the picture of the fin area, tend to distort the true shape. The last two pictures here, taken from far above the board, give a good impression of the actual outline and shape.




I tried the fish once more, this time at a mellower, walled-up wave with room to turn. The board seems to turn well, and holds well in the face of the waves. I had never tried a quad before, and was pleaseantly surprised. Overall I love this board.

So now I am glad I skipped a bunch of steps in the construction that I was considering and don't seem to have affected performance negatively at all; I didn't make concaves, skipped sanding the hotcoat, skipped the glosscoat, didn't make a resin-dam to create a really sharp rail edge in the tail.

What about drawbacks?

The board feels a little heavy on land because the hotcoat is so thick and I didn't sand it. But that doesn't seem to matter in the water. In the water, maybe the nose area of the board is on the big side. That's part of the fish concept, but it might feel better with less volume. I'll have to surf the board more to make up my mind.

The main problem with the fish might be the thickness of the deck lamination (about 8-9 ounces of glass). During the second test session the board unfortunately ended up with a crack in the deck. I've asked for some advice on Swaylocks.com about that. Probably I didn't glass the deck thick enough, considering the light foam I used. So there's a chance I will need to add another glass layer to ensure the board will last a long time.

It may be a while until the next update, as the surf is really great this time of year, and mostly too big for this board anyway. So I'll take my time fixing it, and will instead surf a lot and start planning my next board project. That project will involve some cool color experimentation for sure :)

It's been a long but fun process to build my own board. After many late nights I'm really glad it's done. At the same time, I'm also stoked to build many more in the future!

Board #1 is done!

Finally! Last week I finished the board! I hotcoated the bottom, sanded open the fin boxes, and added a bit more resin on around the boxes.



I finally took the board out at Ocean Beach on Saturday. In the morning the waves were a few feet overhead and rough, so I surfed a different board, but in the afternoon the waves softened and I gave the homemade fish a try. And to my big surprise - it surfed really well. I loved it!!! At first I didn't dare to duckdive it hard, and was affraid it would break any moment. But eventually I relaxed, made it out through the shorebreak. I only surfed 3 waves on it that day, but may main impression was that it was very fast, faster than the board I copied the template from! I think that may be because my copy ended up slighly bigger, since I shaped the foam to be the same size as laminated original, so that the lamination added extra volume. It seems that the extra volume works well for me. Also my bottom is more flat, while the original is double concave. Somehow it all adds up to a faster board, or at least that's how it feels. Amazing.