Wednesday, June 13, 2007

My #0.5...

After that first night behind the planer, I just had to get dusty again.

So there I was, the very next evening, cranking away with the planer. Not surprisingly, my excitement nearly got me into trouble. No more than a few minutes into my shaping session, I was admiring my handiwork with the planer (still spinning) down at my side, when the planer's power cord touched the planer blades for a split second and got nicked down to the wire. Fortunately, only the sheath was nicked, but I was able to see the metal wire strands within. I'm not sure if this will pose a real threat, but I'll have to ask an electrician friend of mine what I should do. For now, I've just got it wrapped with duct tape.

Another lesson I learned real quick was...avoid the big cuts! It was so fun and easy to make big thick cuts with the planer for some reason, I just had to do it all over the freaking place. Maybe its because I had decided that this was a practice blank and would not eventually become a real board. Of course, this left me with tons of big ridges and uneven sections, a pain to correct. I ended up planing, surforming and sanding my mistakes away, but not after lots of sweat (was a hot summer night) and regret. Oh well, lesson learned I hope.

By the end of the night I decided that I'd try to finish skinning and smoothing out the deck and bottom. Hopefully this weekend I'll try truing up the outline of the blank (don't have a template yet) and turning the rails. And now that I think of it, and after some encouragement from Bubba in the previous post's comments, I think I will re-skin this thing and actually shape a real board out of it. Perhaps a rough replica of my 5'10 JC?

Laugh at will, here are the results of my shenanigans... (note duct tape on planer cord where it got nicked by planer blade).


If you look closely on this one, you can see where I got careless with the edge of the Surform...


Outline and rails coming soon....


Time to go home...


Till next time...
kc

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What do you mean by re-skin the blank? how does that work. Also, i think its a good idea to do something with this blank instead of using it as an 80 dollar piece of scrap foam.

So far, so good.

KC said...

crusader,

ya, i'll play it by ear. in the process of getting to know my tools, i'm realizing that its time well spent and i'd rather make big mistakes now on this blank rather than on a full-priced blank. so, if it becomes a real board or not, so be it. i'm going to keep an open mind about this one.

kc

Anonymous said...

yeah... i'm gonna have to come up soon and see this whole deal. i'm fascinated.
oh...and pick up some dominicans. :)