The Boards of 2010

With the completion of the last two projects for the year, the shop has been cleaned and the project slate is clean. Here is a retrospective of the eight boards that were created this year.

Santa’s Workshop–Part 3

For the final project of the year, I went for a high performance pintail longboard for my surfing buddy. His boards were surfed out – yellowed with age, ding repairs all over and heavy with water. It was time for a new one, but I knew he’d never ask me, so I took the initiative.
He was over this morning to drop something off, and I asked him to help me photograph my latest project. I had him hold it up while I snapped, and he suddenly noticed this:

Nice.

Santa’s Workshop-Part 2

I made this nice little fun shape for a young lady who lost her dad to cancer – the same time as I was undergoing treatment. It was a hard time for all, but she remains a happy kid and a good friend to my oldest daughter. She was over one day and saw me working on Angelyne’s fish, and asked me: “uncle, can you make me a surfboard?”. It is impossible to say no to that.
If it looks familiar – that’s because it’s the same shape as the family board. It’s an all-around fun board, can be ridden by little kids like a longboard in mushy waves, by bigger kids a bit more aggressively, and really rips for big kids. It will allow her to either enjoy surfing once in a while as a fun thing, going to the beach and riding the foam straight in, or allow for progression towards more proficient surfing.

Santa’s Workshop, Part 1

First up for the Christmas season is this lovely tanker I built for my big brother Rod. After he and Becky’s wonderful visit to the islands last summer he asked me to build him a suitable board for his home break in the great state of Maine. So we have the “Big Brother” model: 9 feet long, full profile with plenty of thickness. Fabric inlays on both sides; spray fade on the deck with masked rays and pinlines. A real beaut. It’s on a slow boat to South Berwick and should arrive in January.

Big Brother Time-Lapse Shaping

Big Brother Part 2: Shaping from rotorhead guy on Vimeo.

Winter Board 2010

Your basic high-performance shortboard. 6’6” x19”, 2 3/4” thick. Even with double 4 oz. glass bottom and double 4 top with a 6 oz deck patch, it’s still real light.

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.