Day 14 - That looks like a board!

Last night was an awesome night...it was another one of those times when we start to see all our hard work pay off. We had no idea what we were doing when we started, but it's so gratifying to see that our boards are taking shape, literally! We're at the point now that we just can't wait to get them in the water. Although patience is key, since at this point, they'd just sink right to the bottom...

We took up the shaping in full force last night, as we re-discussed some techniques, and tested out some other stuff to refine our process. We broke out both a small block plane and a tiny finger plane, and, along with an orbital sander, worked down Kat's stringer until it was flush. It was amazing to see how well the process worked once we figured it out. Once the stringers were down, we broke out the big 2x4x24" sanding blocks, with 50 and 80 grit paper, and started sanding down the top, and then the bottom, again taking away some of the extra body we'd left on to bring it down to the final shape. I've gotta say, although there's still a heap of work to do (final rails, fine sanding, art, fins, glassing), that Kat's board look very nearly like the real deal.

One thing we read about, but was still surprising was how the foam dust just gets everywhere! It's so hard to get off, and even today, we were finding it on skin and clothes.

Here's a few pics!

Attendees: Drew, Justin, Micah, Kat

Day 13 - Baby's first shapes

The long awaited night...we finally had a chance to do some shaping on our first real board! Drew and I had messed around with the test boards and gotten good results, but we were excited to see how the first live board turned out. Drew & Micah started out cutting some rails on Kat's board, and when I showed up, we discussed the best way to shape the boards. We decided on a strategy, and started sanding down the rails, keeping them flat, but bringing them down to size. We cut out three boards this way to get started, and the results are looking awesome so far! No pictures tonight, but tomorrow we'll bring the camera to capture the magic.

Attendees: Drew, Justin, Micah

Day 12 - Return of the Boards

After a short time off, we were back at it tonight, with the big move to our new shaping space! This is actually an old barn that's been converted into a workshop by a friend of ours, Milton. He's generously allowed us to have a corner of his shop to do all our detail shaping and glassing. We went over to make some room, and then we brought over our shaping stands and all our tools. We wanted to be all ready for our first big night of shaping tomorrow! Stay tuned...

Attendees: Drew, Justin

wee bit of down time

I guess we're in the middle stages now...we've got all the prep work done and have ourselves some great looking blanks, and we're in the process of ordering all the stuff we'll need to finish the boards. So now we have a bit of waiting.

We're hoping to move in to the space we'll use for shaping and glassing starting Monday, and get into the actual shaping stuff the rest of that week. Then, once our fins and fin boxes show up, we can start readying everything for the glassing stage, including doing the artwork and stuff.

On another note, I had the strangest dream last night - one of those ones you still think is real for a minute when you wake up. We had just moved our boards into the shaping bay and were uncovering them, when I saw that mine had snapped in half and had a bunch of holes in it. Talk about a rude awakening! I couldn't believe all my hard work was down the toilet. Andrew was trying to convince me I could make a (very) short board out of the 4ft piece I had left over...

Exciting times ahead, and hopefully no broken boards!

Day 11 - 1/2 price board sale!

It's been a few days since our last post -- we finished doing everything we'd figured out how to do so far and had to do a bunch of research and reading to see what was next. We also had to start looking into ordering fins, fin boxes, fiberglass cloth, epoxy resin, and all the good stuff that comes with that!

But with a free day, and nothing better to do, Drew and I ventured out to the hardware store and picked up a surform, which looks like a cheese grater on the bottom, and is one of the tools we needed to do our fine shaping. Micah and I had glued a test peice of foam to a scrap stringer last week, so today we took our small plane, new surform and some sandpaper and did some testing on how to shape our rails. This went awesome, and we were even impressed at how well our scrap, 1/2 board turned out.

We figured out that with some measuring, we could tape off some highs and lows for the rail shapes, and just use our tools to gradually slope in between these lines. The results were great, and we now feel confident in our ability to tackle the live boards very soon. We still have to find a place to do the final shaping and glassing, so the search continues. Here's a few pics of our test board and results!

Attendees: Drew, Justin

Day 10 - so what the heck do we do now?

Tonight, we finished the first phase of our board building and have all five of our blanks ready to go. The next step is to find a spot where we'll be able to glass the boards. We need to do the shaping and glassing all in the same spot, because we can't risk dinging the boards once they're shaped, trying to move them. We also need to find a spot we can heat easily, because the epoxy resin we'll use for glassing needs to cure around room temperature. So, the hunt is on. We're also still in the process of ordering our fins, and glassing materials, and finding the tools we need to do the detail shaping. We can't wait to keep going, so hopefully we can find a spot soon.

Also, the results of our first poll have been tallied. As you can see to the left, we received 20 votes from our fine visitors. 45% of you seem to think that these boards will attract sharks, more than twice as much as thinks they will catch fire. This doesn't bode well for Kat and I, as we are morbidly afraid of sharks. I don't' think anyone is a fan of catching fire either. Hopefully you are all wrong. Stay tuned for our next poll, we are hoping to finalize some logos and get you voting on those soon!

Here's a few pics of our five blanks to tide you over until we get the shaping process started!

Attendees: Justin, Micah

Day 9 - let your true shape shine through

This afternoon, Drew and I returned to the shop to check the boards we glued up yesterday, and glue and clamp the final two boards. This went slick as snot, and after gluing up the last two, we set about cutting out the shapes on the two boards glued up yesterday.

We set up a smooth process using our new shaping stands and two clamps, which let us hotwire out our board shapes in about 30 minutes. It went great, and we now have three boards cut out and ready for hand shaping.

This part is super exciting, as I mentioned, because the boards now actually look like boards, and we can see everything coming together. After cutting those shapes out, we had nothing left to do, but wait 24 hours for the last two boards to dry. Instead, we spent the evening doing research on the next steps and also finding places where we can order our fins, fin boxes and leash plugs. We'll need these things here about half-way through the glassing process, so we'll have to get them shipped in the next day or so.

Attendees: Drew, Justin

Day 8 - One fish, two fish, red fish, glue fish

When we got into the shop today, we were greeted with the site of a glued, clamped and dried 6'2 Fish that was ready for cutting. We were excited to get going with it, but first we had to get the next two boards glued and set up so they could dry while we worked.

The first order of business was to clear a bunch of foam out of work space - all the leftover offcuts were crowding us out of the shaping bay. We also had to stock up on Gorilla glue - it has lots of sticking power, but apparently no staying power. After the errands were done, it was back to the shop and into clamping mode. While Micah, Dorothy, and I clamped, Drew and Kat finished up work on our shaping stands. We are at the stage now where we needed to have these. They are custom stands designed to hold the surfboard vertically and horizontally to make theme easy to work on. We also refined our clamping process and got one board done, but ran out of materials for clamping a second board. The drying time is 24hrs, and not wanting to do one board at a time, we hit up our local hardware supply stores (Chad Stretch and Joe Mitchell) for extra wood and clamps to get the job done.

Once the boards were clamped, it was time to cut out our first shape from the fully glued Fish. This was an exciting moment, as all our hard work and time looks like it's starting to pay off when you see the cut-out shape. At this stage, it truly resembles a rough surfboard, and you can start to envision what it's going to look like finished. Lots of work to go yet though, so here's some pics to tide you over while we get back to it!

Attendees: Drew, Justin, Micah, Kat, Dorothy (guest clamper)

Day 7 - Rockers, meet Gorilla

Drew and I put in a solid night of board building last night, and it was fruitful and blessed! With the success of our first rocker gluing the other day, we decided to go into factory line mode and glue all the other boards up as well. I'll explain the process here for those who are interested, and if you're just here for the pictures, skip to the bottom!

We started by cutting out the other four board stringers with a jigsaw, after tracing them out with our masonite template. We ruined one stringer, but the final four turned out great. On the advice of some expert shapers on a website we've been following (www.swaylocks.com), we picked up a baby block planer, which is only 1" wide and 3" long. This ended up being a great investment at $12, as it made our stringers turn out much cleaner and smoother than Andrew's Fish, which we didn't have the planer for.

Since Drew's Fish was ready for the second side, we did that first, setting it up on it's own, and clamping it together with about 5 bar clamps to ensure a tight fit. I have to say, we were amazed to see how awesome it looked when we were done - it's actually starting to look like a surfboard!

Then we followed the same process for the other four shapes, which we glued and weighted all together. The PU glue (Gorilla Glue) we're using needs to have one surface wet with water, and the other surface covered in glue. We did one board at a time, lining everything up and putting them one behind another on a sheet of plywood. We covered the tops of all the boards with another sheet, and weighted everything down until there were no gaps. I have to say, it was uber-gratifying to see the boards actually starting to come together. After the end of today, we're hoping to have all the shapes glued together and ready for the shape hotwiring. So check back in later!

In addition to the new pics below, I've added the first pictures we took from our first two board building day to the first two posts. Just scroll down, or click here and here if you're lazy.

Attendees: Drew, Justin

Day 6 - rocking the rockers

Last night was another productive and exciting night. We had Drew's two boards left to cut the rocker shapes on with the hotwire, and, with all our new-found hotwiring expertise, we breezed through that in about 2 hours.

When all the rockers were finished, we turned our attention to stringers, and we took the plunge! Drew's 6'2 Fish was on top of the pile as the last rocker we cut, so we pulled out our first birch hardwood stringer and traced out the rocker profile onto it. We were pumped to find out that we could even fit two profiles onto each stringer sheet! This means we have enough stringer material for 40 boards! Can you say lifetime supply? I can't. I struggle with the "y" sound at the end of supply.

Last night was exciting for another reason as well: "The Kat" made an appearance! She waltzed into the shop and lent her magical hands to our project for a moment, and then, like the wind, she was gone...I think the paparazzi may have scared her away.

Kara, and our good friend Hannah also stopped by to take some pics and video as well, to keep you all updated with our shenanigans.

Attendees: Drew, Justin, Kat, Kara, Hannah (Team model), and Micah stopped by.

Day 5 - wicked stringers, foam cuts and logos

Drew and I did some research and more cutting yesterday evening - we picked up the rest of the foam blanks from my house and then headed over to his place. We worked on some logo ideas first - we have some ones we're pretty pumped about and we're planning on picking a few of our favorites and getting you all to vote on the winner for us. After that, we compared our rough rocker cuts to Drew's quiver of boards to compare sizes and shapes. It looks like we've got quite a bit of sanding to do, but it also looks like we're on the right track, which is awesome!

Today was an exciting one for our little board project too - yesterday we'd dropped off 11 96"x9"x3/4" solid birch hardwood planks to our woodworking elf Micah, who worked his magic and turned those boards into 22 3/16" stringers. And these stringers are beautiful! We got all that wood as leftovers for less than we'd have had to pay for a single board at Home Depot, and they are going to look awesome in the boards.

That also means that tonight might see us gluing our first board together. We've got 2 boards (4 blanks) worth of rough hotwire cuts left to do as well, so we'll see what happens. I'm going to stick up a few videos below too.

Attendees: Drew, Justin, and Micah off-site (rumour has it that "The Kat" might make an appearance tonight, so we've got our fingers crossed)


Our first hotwire test cuts


Our first hotwire rocker cuts

Day 4 - late night foam rendezvous

Drew and I decided to clean up the rest of the templates and whatever else we had time for so we'd be ahead of the game when the stringers were ready this week.

I timed my arrival at the shaping bay perfectly, just as Drew was finishing up sanding down the last templates. Since we had some time, we decided to cut out the rockers for Kat's funboard too. We tried out some new techniques and learned some valuable lessons that we will record here for future generations and the history books:

1. Do not move the hotwire side to side in an attempt to speed it up.
2. Do sand down the wire frequently to keep it clean.
3. Do stand the foam blocks up vertically. This is at least 1000x better than laying it down and I'm not exaggerating. Honestly.
4. Don't let the wire get caught in a rut in the templates, causing you to burn small (but fixable) holes in your foam.
5. Do sand down your templates after each hotwire to get rid of any indentations.

Unfortunately, Kat's board bore the brunt of these learning curves, and she will now be making a 3'4 Funboard instead of a 7'6. Here's a few pics of our templates:

Attendees: Drew, Justin (is Kat even a real person??)

Day 3 - little hotwire's big day

Today was an awesome day for us - we made a heap of progress and actually made our first foam cuts! We had a few celebrity guest helpers and enough respirators and charcoal filters to sink a surfboard. Speaking of which, cast your vote on the poll to the right to let us know whether you think our boards will sink, swim, catch fire, attract sharks, or make us surf like Mick Fanning. I think we all know what the answer is...

Today's work-day started with sanding down our masonite templates. We matched up the pairs (like the kid's game) and sanded down the template for Micah and Kat's 7'6 funboard design, both the rocker and the shape. Speaking of which, here's a breakdown of the boards we're making:
Drew - 6'8 Semi-gun and 6'2 Fish
Justin - 7'6 Hybrid
Micah - 7'6 Funboard
Kat - 7'6 Funboard

Once the funboard rockers were ready, we tested out our fancy schmancy hotwire tool. After connecting it to an old battery charger, we did some test cuts on an old piece of foam. Everybody kept it at arm's length, as we all suspected it to asplode at any second. But, we were smarter than we thought (S-M-R-T), and the hotwire worked better than we'd hoped. After tweaking the wire thickness a bit with a trip to town, we set about cutting out the rockers for Micah's board.

Before we cut out any top shapes, we need to cut out our stringers and start gluing our rocker shapes together. So that is the project for this week - Micah is going to take the birch hardwood planks we scored from work and mill them down to 1/8" for our stringers.

End of day had the score at shapers 1, boards 0.

Attendees: Drew, Justin, Micah, Dor (new team rookie), Kara (team photographer), and not Kat.

Day 2 - masonite meets Micah with jigsaw

Tip of the day: "When cutting out surf templates, enlist the help of a skilled woodworker-guy (or girl)."

After Drew and I spent an afternoon cutting out one rocker and one shape for a single board, we decided to streamline our process, and get our good friend Micah "on board" for today's effort. Micah is building a board with us too, so it worked out in line with our master plan.

Micah is a very gifted woodworker, and he tore through the rest of the masonite templates with the jigsaw one-handed, while blindfolded and juggling with his other hand. It was wicked. Drew and I kept him working by tracing out doubles of every template before-hand so we have two of everything.

Our plan was to mount the templates to each side of our foam blanks and use our fancy-dancy hotwire to make quick work of the foam, removing much of our chance to make a big mess of things. This seemed like a good idea but required a lot of prep-work. But we're still amped, so we had a grand time!

By the way, a huge thanks to Drew's dad, Fred, for letting us use a corner of his heated garage for making a mess in.

Attendees: Drew, Justin, Micah (Kat, in spirit I'm sure)

Day 1 - the beginning of the end

Our first day of actual construction today. There's been a lot of build-up to this moment. Lots of blood, sweat and tears (Andrew won't stop crying about these friggin' boards). We've already built our own hotwire tool, which is pretty darn cool if I do say so myself, and we've stocked up on the materials we need to get started - big foam blocks, masonite sheets for templates, tools of every shape and sort, and a winningest attitude - the boards don't float without the attitude.

Our first day consists of carefully and lovingly tracing out our full-size paper templates onto masonite, and cutting out the templates with a jigsaw. Not the most exciting process in the whole job, but we are amped up enough that it seems awesome! Pics to follow from Drew's camera...

Attendees: Drew, Justin

Too cold to surf?

Well, it appears that even the hardy eastern Canadians have a limit when it comes to cold-water surfing. The water is about 1 degree Celsius, and so our surf season is over until mid-March.

So what better way to spend our surfless winter than trying to build our own boards? We did some research, bought some material, and the project is underway.

We're uber-pumped and want to chronicle this momentous adventure for our friends to follow along and be uber-pumped with us. We'll try and keep you updated as best we can with pictures and sarcastic dialogue.

Onwards and upwards!

the lifestyle..

shock rockers, typhoon templates and 'can't touch this' Hotwires are just the beginning of the luxurious living large of a shaper...i'm glad i cashed in!