The Kala II: Electric Bugaloo

The same shape as this board; I used the template to design the frames for a one-off wood board. I went with a nice bookmatched redwood top and a lauan bottom (ripped and alternated at the stringer and glassed on both faces). All in all I still prefer a properly planked bottom but the lauan is quick and easy to work with, and looks good. I went with a bonzer fin setup with an FCS trailer rather than the regular large single fin – I intend to surf this one as a slippery twin as well as the bonzer setup.  The smaller side fins are glassed on and made of meranti marine plywood.
Artwork is a kala I shot a while back (hence the name) and printed up myself. I wanted to see how the heavy rice paper would glass, and it came out nice. The blue highlights cover the deck-rail joint, which due to the heavy dome of the deck came out uneven. The lizard on the bottom was heat-transferred directly on to the wood.
Rails are strip-planked with alternating white fir and mahogany. The leash plug is stacked ply, cut and worked by hand with a stainless bolt as the anchor.
Video of the gyotaku process after the pics.

The Kala

6’5” single fin round-tail, single concave to double concave/vee, moderate rocker, 2 5/8” thick. Multi-color resin tint with cutlap on deck.

Konahuanui

Konahuanui is the name of the highest peak on the Koolau range on Oahu. It sits prominently over the Hawaii Loa campus of HPU and looms large above the Pali gap (where the lookout is). The name, according to Tom Stone (professor of Hawaiian studies at Kamehameha) means “his large fruit”…as it is shaped a bit like…well, you get it.
Anyhow, this board is a full-on big wave gun – built for tackling serious North Shore surf. 9’1”x21.5”, vee in the nose and again just forward of the fin to flat out the back. This is based on inputs from a couple of prominent shapers – the vee in the nose helps negotiate chop on those big Sunset faces, and vee-to-flat in the tail provides a good balance of stability and maneuverability. Triple-stringer 2.0 EPS with heavy glass (double 6 oz bottom, triple 6 oz top).

Ride Report: Hynd Sight

Riding finless takes an entirely new mindset to surf. Paddling and catching the wave is pretty much the same…but try and crank a bottom turn off the tail like a “normal” board and you’ll just swap ends. Move your weight forward – engage much more of the rail – and order is restored. It’s  much more sensitive to small inputs; and the crutch is to stay very low and use your hands for coarse corrections – but it’s totally manageable. On a wall, once the rail bites it really takes off. On the flats it’s more squirrely. I understand D. Hynd’s 360 moves now – they functionally slow up the board while the wave catches up. Plus they are fun! Easier to paddle and take off than the alaia, with the same speed thrill.

Hynd Sight

The natural evolution of my finless surfboard obsession was realized recently when I came across some video of Derek Hynd surfing Jeffrey’s Bay on a finless board with deep channels in the tail.

I’ve been a fan of channels for a long time – my go-to board for the North Shore in college was a 6’ 10” thruster with deep channels. It was the fastest board I had ridden and would make sections that otherwise I’d get stuck behind.
Anyhow, Mr. Hynd’s boards are somewhere in between an alaia and a modern fiberglass board, with the funky tail. I’ve had success with my hollow-wood “Nohu” board – I’ve ridden it nearly exclusively since I made it. One of my lessons learned is that the tiny little twin fins on it bite almost as much as full-sized fins.   Between the rail, the tail design and those fins, it really held tight. Maybe too tight for what I was looking for.
So I took what I could glean from Hynd’s designs and combined them with my alaia and Nohu knowledge to come up with this “Hyndsight” design. It’s 6’10”x 21 5/8”, about 3” thick but with a good amount of foam removed from the tail concaves and the nose. The top and rails were painted to match my old Sunshine quad from 1984. The bottom…well, I let my creativity get the better of me.

 

Left: The New model. Right: The inspiration from 1984.

Above: Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain…

Pokeboard

This is for my youngest daughter, who is a pokemon fanatic. It’s the same “Malasada” template I used on the “demon hands” board, but a little thinner. It makes a great kids board as it is wide and stable, yet it is a full high-performance adult shortboard as well – thus it will grow with the kid.
I think it’s a good move to teach kids on a shortboard as soon as they are comfortable in the water. It builds strong surfing fundamentals – paddling, turning, balancing – where a longboard does not. I can always tell someone who learned to surf on a longboard – their style reflects the easy and forgiving nature of the big stick.

The Malasada

It’s a “Hawaiian Biscuit”.  Short, wide in both tail and nose and shallow rocker. Vee-tail with channels for speed. K3 fins on FCS Fusion inserts. Lightweight. This board will go airborne off the lip.

A Reasonable Facsimile

One of the joys of doing surboard art is using my technical abilities to bring an artist’s design to life on foam. Noted artist Paul Arnold designed the spectacular graphic design for his Waimano model mini-longboard. For this design – I call this the “Malasada” model (it’s like a CI Biscuit…but Hawaiian) the young man who ordered the board worked up this design with his father:

Armed with my new Iwata airbrush – which, once one gets the paint consistency and air pressure figured out, works like a dream – I came up with this:

The Grey Ghost

A 7’ funboard (the “Kalaeloa Blaster” template) for my Nephew Al who just graduated from high school (Westford Academy, home of the “Grey Ghosts”). Epoxy/EPS construction with airbrushed skulls and highlights, FCS fusions and lightweight glass with a deck patch.

Paul’s Longboard

Fresh out of the shop, a sweet 8’ longboard for my high school buddy Paul. He designed the graphics and paint scheme on it, and I designed the template/shape for the board. A classic shape with concave to double concave on the bottom, soft-to-hard rails and a modern 2+1 fin setup. With the pintail and a nice continuous rocker it’ll work in just about anything from ankle slappers to overhead tubes, looking good the whole time.

Nohu

The nohu, or scorpionfish, is a real ugly fish. Thus I named  my newest design after it. It’s a 7’ twin fin fish with minimal rocker and a wiiiiiide tail. I made it for small days when it’s too mushy for an alaia, as an alternative to a longboard. We’ll see how it rides – the fins are real small, so it should slide quite a bit but still bite enough for control.
Here’s the inspiration (not one of my prints):

And my take on it. Meranti marine plywood interior frame, bookmatched redwood top, redwood rails, lauan ply bottom. I actually ripped the ply and alternated the light/dark faces for the bottom, using a layer of fiberglass to bind them into a single sheet prior to gluing to the frame. It’s not the prettiest but it’s easy and  inexpensive, and stucturally both light and strong (as it’s glassed on both sides). Fins are my own design; nose/tail blocks are redwood with paulownia on the nose and mahogany on the tail block. :

Laminating/Pinlines and a Completed Board

For a board like this, laminating is a multi-stage process. I like to do the majority of art and color right on the foam. Once the art is good to go, I do a “skim coat” of thin epoxy resin over the raw foam. This fills in the many small gaps and spaces between the EPS foam beads, and will provide a solid base for the glass coat to lock on to. Once it starts to kick, I’ll lay out any logos or art that I’ve done up on translucent vellum and squegee them flat, ensuring all the air bubbles are out from underneath. Then the glass goes on – while the thin “skim coat” and wet decals are kicking. A nice tight lamination, pulling out from the center to the rails, usually gives a nice flat surface with the cloth well adhered to the blank.
On this board I’ve done a fabric inlay on the nose. Once the fabric is cut out, I pour on the resin, spread it around, give it a minute or two to soak, and squegee it flat. The edges will get covered with pinlines after the lamination.

If I’m doing pinlines, I’ll wait a day or so for the first lamination to cure. I clean the board with denatured alcohol and a tack cloth,  and then lightly sand down the area where the pinline will go. Then I mask it off and lay the line using an art brush and good-quality opaque acrylic. I’ll do a thin, quick coat which will seal the edge between the board and the tape, then lay it on thicker. Once complete I pull the tapes, clean up any goofs, and it’s off to the next lam.

Between lams is also a good time to look at the board up close and far away, and see if any changes to the art need to be done. This is the last chance I’ll have to put something under glass (and thus make it a permanent part of the board).

Overall I’m fairly pleased with the end result. There are numerous imperfections that are clear to me, as I’ve hand-crafted every square inch of it from blank to polish. Everyone who’s seen it so far has been impressed; hopefully the customer will be also.

Color

I like to make boards with a good bit of color. Not a big fan of clear/white boards. Anyhow, Paki’s 9’0 is coming along, almost ready for glass.

Uhu

The latest out of the shop is this unique alaia. Based on the success of the omilu model, I made some changes that I hoped would be beneficial. First, more wood. The omilu was a bit to thin and too light, making it flex more than I would like. Additionally I don’t feel like it would hold up to  overhead waves. Also, maintaining more width throughout would help in catching waves and planing. The omilu tended to downshift once off the face. While fairly easy to maneuver, I felt it was too loose – particularly when in the flats, where it was a chore to keep it from spinning out.

 

So, I developed the uhu. Very little wood was removed from the blank – just enough to give it a nice outline.Unlike the narow waist of the omilu I went with a “stinger” tail, keeping the board wide up until the last 20 inches or so where the tail steps in. For control I went with a Catch Surf setup – rounded 70/30 rails up front and hard, inward-canted rails in the tail (Catch Surf hand-makes finless soft surfboards which are really taking off).  The bottom is the standard single concave, with the addition of a couple of channels in the tail to help keep it straight.

So how does it work? I took it out on a nice chest-high day at an empty reef break out by the Coast Guard air station at Barbers. It was perfect alaia surf – long, gentle lines with reforms and multiple sections. The board performed beyond expectations. It was markedly easier to catch waves than the omilu, allowing me to get in earlier and really set up my rides. It tracked straight – almost too straight, and I really had to use a shortboard-like technique to turn it, unlike the omilu which really needs a light touch. The only negative was that it really wasn’t any easier to paddle than the others (alaias are a MAJOR arm workout). The extra wood didn’t make a difference – it was essentially neutrally buoyant weight. The positive side of that is that you can duck-dive the thing about 6 feet no problem, and actually “swim” underwater with it.

As for the graphics…after cutting the outline, it just looked like an uhu (parrotfish). I bagged my first uhu a few weeks ago (granted a red-phase, not a bicolor) and that sealed the deal. I just wanted something interesting on the back so I made some camo stencils and went with an aquaflage scheme. The logo is again just a reflection on my current obsession of spearfishing. I couldn’t bring myself to put a camera mount on the nose – it would just ruin the art.

I’m really excited about riding this board this winter. This will be my “co-number one” along with a “normal” shortboard I’m making for more critical surf.

Manini – Done.

The newest model is a twin-fin fish that I’ve called the Manini (the Hawaiian name for the convict tang, one of themost common reef fish). This one has a nice wide bat-tail and low-to-medium rocker to keep it going in smallish surf. This one is a kids board which will allow my 10-year old to progress from mini-longboards and funshapes up to proper short boards. It’s still got plenty of volume and length for her. At 6’ it may seem small but fish are generally ridden 6”-12” shorter than ones “regular” board due to their design. Take a mini-mal, cut 6’ out of the center and there’s your fish.

 

Manini

The little fish progresses. Almost ready for glass.

 

“Little Brother” is also shaping up, ready for art. 6’ 4” squash: