I bit the bullet this morning. After waiting all day for the rain to ease yesterday, I really needed to got into the ‘ozito shed’ to finish the cut blank so I can take it to the glasser tomorrow … after some shed repairs, well, almost … I’ll post about that separately.
So, I set up the bay and got into finishing the blank.
I started with the ‘dags’ on the nose and tail, then into the finer finishing of the tail. Using the trusty yellow plastic saucer from my gidget’s cubbyhouse, I added the ‘curve’ to the rounded square tail. In the process, the bottom from tail to the 18″ point on both the deck and bottom got a hit.
From there it was onto the fine tuning of the nose, which was again frustrating because the stringer is not centred, and trying to get it looking right becomes a process of chasing my tail. It’s still not perfect, and looks a bit like a micro version of an old 70’s single fin … you know the ones with the thick noses.
I’m really happy with the bottom contours, it’s single into double concave, and have basically come straight off the machine cut … other than taking the machine grooves out of the blank, I have not touched them. Actually, for 90% of the blank that’s been all I have done. The rails took a bit of work to get the final curve and shape where I wanted them, and not wanting to make the board too asymmetrical I decided to stick with the base from the machine cut and computer design. I think the rails may need some more tweaking in future versions …
From start to finish … 2 hours!
Then I spent some time checking fin placement measurements, and marking up the points onto the blank … that took another hour, mainly due to my attempt to measure once, mark once (by double and even triple checking as I went along). I ended up going with the rear fin at 3 5/8″ with sides at 11 1/4″ … I have ‘measured’ to set the toe (i.e. rather than the x off the nose line up process) … went with 1/4″ toe.
Then it was time to add the FFW ‘logo” by stencil, which took longer to tape up, set up and wash up than actually doing … 30mins and all done.
As I was waiting for pictures to load for this post I went out and gave the logo a hit with some clear acrylic spray to stop any ‘bleeding’ when it’s glassed. So, all done in just on 3 1/2 hours … I’d hate to be getting paid piece rates, but as far as an easy weekend project goes, it is really not that time consuming.