Thursday 17 May 2012

Day of shaping - Day 4

Day four of our one week workshop was aimed at shaping the board. We unveiled the board from its overnight clamping of the deck and got to work removing all the excess material on the deck, bottom and rails. While it's important to take off a large amount of material, it's even more important to always hold in your mind how you want the board to end up. As with making anything, its tricky to put material back on!

So we did all of the work with hand tools so that you stay connected to what your hands are doing and don't have the chance of making costly mistakes that can occur if you use power tools. The most of the work is done using the surform and hand plane and then it is important to tie all the curves together smoothly, for which we use some nice big sanding boards.

Darren got on pretty well today and has an almost complete board, so we know tomorrow will be all about the finishing touches and putting right anything we see when we look at it fresh in the morning.

Darren begins the day by removing all the clamps that have held the deck down over night - a really exciting phase...suddenly you have a surfboard!


Using the templates to get the outline at the nose and the tail correct, making sure we are following the right curves when shaping.


Getting to work with the surform...there was plenty of material to come off the nose.


Always important to keep touching the board to make sure you're achieving the desired shape and hopefully the same on both rails!


Standing back from the board as we're almost complete allows you to see how the two rails tie togehter and how they look down the length of the board.