Tails and Buttcracks

Recently, I received a comment on my last post requesting that I describe a little bit about how I went about doing the tail on the Datsun Twinnie (which I was in the middle of working on when I was so rudely interrupted by local thieves). So, I'll try to describe here what I did (and did wrong) as requested. As with everything I do, this is by no means the best or "right" way, its just how I happened to do it....mostly by feel and guesswork. hehe

The tail was pretty easy actually, but really the one pictured in the Datsun Twinnie is only half done, it still needs lots of fine tuning. For one thing, I should have started by thinning down the blank a bit more near the tail closer to desired thickness. As you can see, the tail is a bit chunkier than it probably should be. But, in any case, once the blank's tail area is down to thickness, you can draw in the outline.

For the outline, I used the nose portion on the board's original template to draw in the swallow from the edge to the stringer on the bottom of the blank. I think lots of people have special templates for swallows, but there's something nice about being able to reuse the nose portion of the original template for drawing in the tail. Reusability is always nice. :)

Cutting in the tail would've been nice if I had an electric jigsaw, but I used a small handsaw instead, stopping just short of the middle of the stringer from each side. Then by hand, snap off the cutout.

After cutting it out, I then took a small (rattail) rounded file to file in the 'buttcrack'. After that, it's really just a matter of using a small surform and sanding block to sculpt the contour of the tail to blend in with the crack. When finish sanding the stringer/crack, it helps to protect the foam with some masking tape along the edge of the stringer so that you don't sand into the foam.

Well, thats about it. Sorry I don't have progress pics, but maybe next time....whenever that will be.

kc

Down But Not Out

Bad news for Novice Shaper fans, I've decided to vacate my shaping room space as a result of another break in (second in six months) while I was away enjoying warm Hawaiian waves earlier this month. Nothing was stolen, except a $20 radio and some piece of mind. Amazing what a crack head will do to for a few bucks.

Well, its all good cause I wasn't anticipating on glassing much over the winter in a freezing garage anyways, and firing up a portable heater in a room with lots of flammable goodies wasn't a thrilling option either.

I'm sure I'll find another space soon, till then, the shaping room and all the equipment will reside in storage.

Hope to be back up and running soon....

kc

Fin Flower

Some fins came in from 101 Fins today...




Thanks Marlin!!!

kc

Datsun Twinnie

A friend of mine recently asked me to shape him something for the mushy slop-surf that we typically get here in the NY/NJ area. After telling him that my Brom twin just about tripled my wave count over my everyday shortboard, he was sold on a twin fin. So last week we began on what will eventually be known as The Datsun Twinnie (named in honor of his band, Red Datsun, and their recent debut release). The shape is basically a scaled up version of my Brom, with a few tweaks here 'n there. Still needs work, but here's the progress thus far...

The nose needs work, gonna add a beak nose. Ideally, I should've cut in the beak while cutting the top rail bands, but I didn't figure this out till reading Swaylocks afterwards....



Future owner and Red Datsun band member...


The tail, not quite there yet, but its a start...


Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll be able to finish this one anytime soon, I'm leaving this week for the North Shore and two weeks of Hawaiian surf. Yippee!!!!!

Hopefully I'll have some pics of Hawaii to post, along with the finishing stages of the Datsun Twinnie.

Aloha,
kc

Blue Foam, Guest Shaper, and LokBox Vid

Just a few random thoughts that have been floating around my head lately...

First up, here's a pic of my neighborhood hardware store's garbage pile from the other day, see anything interesting?...


The baby blue slabs in the middle of the pic are slabs of Dow Freezermate EPS foam. A friend of mine decided that it would be cool to "borrow" a few (...or six) to make into surfboards. The dims of the "blanks" are 7'10" x 24" x 3" and flawless. I don't know anything about epoxy yet, but I assume we'd need to glue in some stringers, go stringerless, or as my friend would like, add carbon parabolic stringers (which is way beyond me). According to my friend, this is the same stuff that those blue Salomon (sp?) boards are skinned with. The stuff is super light and feels like they would shape easily.

But, there are a few things I'm uncertain of:
1) In order to accomodate rocker, seems like we'd need to glue together some blocks near the nose/tail regions to increase thickness. What kind of glue is used for this?
2) Speaking of glue, what kind of glue is used to glue up blanks and stringers?
3) Why was there a big black SUV with tinted black windows following us as we carried our "borrowed" foam back to our apartments? And why did he stop in front of my building while staring at us in an unfriendly manner???

Should be interesting to see what becomes of this blue foam. I feel guilty about taking the foam for some reason. My friend assures me that its garbage, but I can't see why they'd throw out perfectly good foam. I'm not entirely convinced its good karma to make surfboards out of stolen garbage...or maybe it is, in a weird recycling kind of way. (Chris, any bad karma resulting from all of this is your fault!)

On the shaping front, not much going on with me these days, just working on a twinnie fish (my first one) for a friend. Pics of that project to come later. Till then, here are some pics of a friend of mine who is guest-shaping a fish for himself. It'll be his #001 and will have glasson bamboo twin keels by 101 Fin Co. Go Jamie!


Oh, and one last thing... I happen to stumble upon a video over at Swaylocks that shows how to use the new LokBox (non-vacuum) installation kit. Thanks to NY_Surfer for this great resource!

Thats it for now...
kc

ps. Say a prayer for all those close to the fires in SoCal....especially these guys.

My New Project

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I'd like to take a moment to introduce you to one of my new projects. Its called: "The Rehabilitation of a Mandala" (forgive me Manny!). Long story short, a friend and I were going opposite directions and we collided. It was only my second day on the board, and I was paddling out, while he was dropping in. The rest I'll leave to your imagination. Here are some pics to help you visualize...

A view from the bottom. Hmm, whats that strange white line on the left side?...


Closeup of the "white line". My friend's fin did some serious damage, the fin gash is about 4 inches long. Pretty clean cut though. I get chills thinking about what it would've felt like if it was my head instead. Interestingly, you can see where the cutlap separated from the bottom lam.



And rounding the rail, you'll see that the fin penetrated straight through to the deck.


On the deck side, there are these slabs of glass that got pulled up and away from the foam. Probably as the fin exited, its tip caught the edge of the glass and pulled it up. Nice how straight it peeled up, and in a perfect rectangular shape too.



Nice clean fin cut, looks like it was cut with a Ginsu knife...


I wonder if I'll be able to color match the ding repair. Actually, screw the color match, I wonder if I'll be able to match the wax job!?!


All in all, I'm not upset....(that doesn't sound like denial, does it?) Actually, when it happened, I knew I could fix it so I didn't get all bent outta shape. In fact, my friends actually got more upset than I did. Knowing how to shape and glass, having the space to do so, and having the supplies makes dings like this much less stressful (and cheaper) than before.

Most of all I'm thankful that I'm still healthy and alive. If it was my head instead, well...lets not go there.

kc

Flat Daze

Ugh. I think we're on track for one of the lamest hurricane seasons in many years. I passed some time the other day waxing my new board in hopes of one day actually being able to use it. This is what a wax job looks like when you've gotten a new board and boredom takes over...



And some other pics...

Tool Porn

Keeping dust to a minimum...not easy. I only have one room to create my magic, and it has to accommodate all my shaping, glassing, and sanding activities. Well after my first batch of boards, the dust was overwhelming. It was very discouraging (not to mention unhealthy) and I considered giving up on glassing/sanding altogether and paying a local glasser to do the dirty work. That is, until I laid my eyes upon this baby...

Its a Random Orbit Sander with vacuum exhaust. Most major tool brands have some version of this thing. A while back my woodworking guru friend, Jon, recommended that I invest in one of these...but since I already had a Milwaukee rotary sander I hesitated. What I didn't realize is that, unlike my Milwaukee, this thing has an exhaust! As luck would have it, I have an exhaust system for my planer and something like this would plug in perfectly!

Still, there will be times when I'll need to revert back to my good ol' dusty Milwaukee. Well all is not lost, I can still use a DustMuzzle to keep the air dust-free and under control.

Of course, I stumbled upon all this info at Swaylocks....look HERE and HERE.

Mmm...Random Orbit Sanders. Mmm...Dust Muzzles.

Mmmust buy.

kc

Riddle Me This...

Question: What makes a hurricane-less flat-spell surf season even more painful and torturous?

Answer: A shiny new Mandala in the mail...



Unexpected surprise. We didn't discuss this on the phone when I ordered the board, but it came with a groovy tapered stringer for more twang in the tail (in theory).


The area under the nose has a slight vee/belly, at the fins is double (see pic), and at the swallowtail its single concave. I like.


Another unexpected surprise: A concave deck...


Thanks to Manny, Moonlight, and even Fedex for making my day.

C'mon waves!

kc

#3

Some pics of #3, for a guy here at work. Looks like he picked a bad week to start his Ramadan fast...







kc

Useful Nugget for Novice Shapers

For novice shapers like me, starting out can be intimidating and frustrating. The good news is, just about all of the information you could ever need to get started is out there floating around in cyberspace. The not so good news is, you have to run around collecting these nuggets of information as if on an online scavenger hunt. Searching through forums, googling keywords, and rummaging through old posts can take lots of time and energy.

Well, here's a page that I stumbled upon over at Greenlight (providers of environmentally friendly surfboard building supplies). Click HERE. There's lots of great information about stands, templates, and railbands....you know, all the stuff we novice shapers are unsure of and always have questions about (well, at least I did).

Would be nice if they added a little something regarding fin placement. One can always hope...

Adios amigos,

kc

#2 and #3, Part 3 (Finished!)

I guess the good news is, I'm done with #2 and a few steps away from finishing #3. The bad news is there still haven't been any good waves 'round here so I have yet to take #1 on her maiden voyage. Friggin' summer flat spell is driving me crazy!

Anyways, get ready for lots of eye candy (not necessarily 'pretty' eye candy, but something to look at nonetheless). I've been collecting pics of #2 and #3 progress for some time now and figured it was about time to dump them.

In Part 2, I'd finished my cutlaps and hotcoating. Figure, I'm ready to start working on the finbox installs, right? Uh, not so fast. Dunno how I missed it, but after reading up on finbox installations, I found that its recommended to have an extra patch/layer of glass where the finboxes will be installed. Too late to put the patches under my lamination, so no choice but to stick 'em on top of my hotcoat (according to Swaylocks). First cut the patches, then prep the area by rough sanding where the patches will go, and then laminate the patches on. Ugly, but relatively painless.


Ok, back to business. Routing the holes for my Probox install was a breeze. Used some spray adhesive to stick the jigs onto the board, then slowly routed out the hole with a trim router. The Probox install kit comes with the bit and bearing for the router which makes the process a cinch. Still, on my first hole, I screwed up and accidentally routed the hole too deep. (Complications from this mistake to come later...)


As a side note, when setting the leash plug on one of the boards a few days earlier, I failed to completely top off the hole with resin. So, I took an extra minute to tape off the plug's opening and topped off the resin. Hmm, guess I should've taped off the area better, but it all sands off in the end. No big deal.


Ok, back to my finboxes. I've already poured the resin/pigment/milled fiber mixture into the holes and squished the finboxes in. Remember that one finbox hole that I routed too deep? Well, extra resin pooled in the bottom due to the extra depth and the whole thing got pretty hot. I panicked and dumped water onto it to avoid a meltout of the foam (wrong move btw, you should use a soaked rag or paper towel instead). I paced back and forth wondering if foam was melting underneath. Talk about nervewracking. All went well though, no meltout, whew! Now proceed to let the resin gel, peel off the jigs, and we're ready for sanding...


Ok, I must admit I slacked off on the sanding pics. Just picture me with an electric sander running around the board a thousand times in a big white dust cloud burning through here 'n there. Took some 80 grit to grind down the boxes and leash plug, then moved on to 120, 150, and 220.

Fast forward to some pinlines. Laying the tape here, not easy as they make it look on videos, but after some trial and error I got some (barely) acceptable results.


Paint on some pigmented hotcoat resin, and begin my favorite pastime: watching the resin cure...oh yeah.


Ok, enough watching, lets pull the tape...


The tape, post-pull. Hey, kinda looks like a tertiary protein structure!......uh, what?


Thick, then thin, then thick, then thin...the story of my first pinline. But hey, at least I didn't use cheater tape (and it shows, doh!).


Almost home now. I decided to do a polished sanded finish instead of a gloss coat. Took it down to (or up to?) 800 grit, then compounded, and polished. The finbox reinforcement patches can be seen if you look closely. I tried my best to feather the edges of the patches and blend them in, but you can see some weave and whatnot. Not perfect, but I couldn't be bothered to get too obsessed at this point. Polished with some super duty compound and surfboard polish. Ends up looking almost like a fresh hotcoat. Stuck in the fins for effect, and voila!...#2 is done.


Looks like a board Santa would ride...


Still have to lay the pinlines on #3 (the yellow board), but should be done by the end of this weekend. After that, and some sweeping, I can start shaping again and try my first attempt at a fish shape. Can't wait!

kc