I always enjoy reading build-threads and always appreciate when people share their process.
Going through sk8ments fish thread this morning reminded me, I could share what I´m building at the moment.
Nothing fancy or extraordinary, but anyhow….
I´m working on a 7.2 bonzer and a 7.6 midlength glider kind of thing.
Both boards for me. I´m only at board 15 by now. Landlocked and not many surfers round here. Let alone any shapers. So more or less messing around without a clue. Any feedback and advise on the shapes or the working process is highly appreciated.
First board is an Bonzer 5 with round pintail.
As I fly across Europe on vacations, I had to use FCS plugs to remove all the fins for travelling.
I´d preferred glass-on runners, but was scared they would not survive aircargo.
Hotwired the EPS blank and trued everything up.
Took my time to figure out the fin layout.
Most dimension can be found and I tried to scale pictures of bonzer boards in the 7.0-7.4 range.
Never done or ridden a bonzer, I´m curious if my layout will work out.
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(My EPS blocks are 2m / 6.7 long, so that´s why there is an ugly yellow PU glue line in the tail. I used white pigmented epoxy for the 7.6 glider lateron)
I decided to keep the bottom contours simple with my first try.
Skipped the channel between the runners, would have been hard to pass it between the fusion plugs.
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The outline is smooth and eggish, with the wide point slightly forward.
Something like 7.2 x 21.25 or 21.5 I think.
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The second board is a 7.6 glider, singlefin pintail. I´ve never ridden or shaped something like this, but the classic beauty of those outlines made me want something like this in my quiver.
As I´m hard on decks/center stringers , I built my shorter boards stringerless.
No hard structures where my legs are, this way dents don´t cause any cracks.
For this longer one I tried a parabolic stringer glue up. Stringers should be outside from where my thigs dent the deck.
This is my first stringer glue up. I remembered Barry Snyder doing outlines with a long router.
So I bought a 80mm cutter for my router, made a masonite template for the stringer curve (basically just a radius of 7500mm).
No room for errors with that scary long cutter, but I took my time and the cut came out really cool.
I bought slightly foaming PU glue, which was a fast setting 5 minutes version.
Prepared everything in advance, but in the end I couldn´t completely avoid making a mess.
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After trueing the blank, I was quite pleased how the stringers came out.
Far from a good glue up, but didn´t look as messy as I thought directly after the glue up.
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Shaping a stringered blank was new to me. But I enjoyed it a lot. Taking down the woods adds a new aspect to the handshaping.
As expected, the sections where the stringers pierce through the rails need a lot of practice to get right.
The glue stays a little flexible and is hard to take down with the handplane. Maybe I´ll use something harder next time, like gorilla glue or titebond.
I´ll need a lot of practice working with the handplane. And I only got a cheap 5€ handplane right now.
But I´m keen to do other stringered blanks in the future and ordered a better mini handplane, read about how to sharpen the blades and so on.
This is what it looked when roughed out, I thinned the nose and the tail lateron on and refined it over all.
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A bit of panel V in the nose, single concave in the middle, double concave in front of the fin, flat behind the fin.
I chined/beveled the rails, quite high in the front, maybe like 40/60 in the middle, hard edge/down rail in the tail. Rails are “eggish”, not to boxy, not thinned and sharp like with displacement hulls.
In the meantime I glassed the bonzer and spackled the glider.
Both are drying in the living room now.
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