Glassing the Fish - Top Lam

Laying out the top sheets


Taking them down to size


The tail. This'll be interesting...


Nice and easy...


Laying on the tint band


Going for a nice cascade


Before cleaning it up


Head high and glassy!

Glassing the Fish - Bottom Lam

Laying the bottom sheet


Fin patch before full bottom resin. This was probably the hardest/least successful part of the glassing. That's cool though, next time will be better.


Glass and tint for the fin patch.


Guide cuts for the tint band.


Bottom all tinted up and ready for the full clear coat. The deckpatch came out a lot wonky but whatever, that's learning.

Shaping a Surfboard - Take 2

Brian from Greenlight is an awesome furking dude and basically offered me a redo on the whole process for free because my last board was A) a piece of unridable shit (no duh) and B) foiled way too hard to even put fin boxes in so unusable at that size. Happy to say that it's now being used for a kids board/mini-simmons. Which rules not to have the whole thing go to waste.

So here's my 2nd take on shaping:

We first started by fixing all the crappy warbles in the template and reshaping the nose into something a little less needly. Here's the new outline. We took about an inch off the top so now it's closer to a 6'3" instead of a 6'4"




Here's the first chop. Man this brown trout is way easier to get right the first time with a jigsaw and a planer instead of a handsaw and a rasp.



Notice where I fucked up by putting the saw at an angle and took a chunk out. Fortunately that little digger went away with cutting the rail bands...



Which obviously takes vast amount of concentration...



But before knocking out the rail bands we cut and cleaned up the swallow


Here she is with rails cut before rounding. I went with a medium rail based off of a board I liked once.



Next up, rounding it off



And here's the final product!



And to celebrate, we did cocaine

Shaping a Surfboard - Take 1

A few weeks ago I had my first day in the shaping room over at Greenlight Surf Supply in Belmar, NJ. What a shit ton of fun. Shaping is something I could do for years and never fully understand. Definitely hard as fuck but really fun. Unfortunately, the planer wasn't working so I had to do all the thinning by hand and completely fucked the thing up but that's ok, fucking up is how I learn.

Making a template off of an online printout. The other side is crayon rubbed off a board I like.


Both templates ready to go. Left is a 6'4" semi-retro/semi-modern. Right is a 6'2" Lis inspired retro.


Decided to go with the 6'4" and a blank with fairly flat rocker for speed. This thing probably won't love the steep takeoffs but on a wall it should be fun.


Hand sawed the rough outline


Here's the progress at the end of the day. Happily, this pile of shit is getting turned into a mini-Simmons for some lucky person.