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Surfboard Shaping 101

  • Writer: Lili Tuggle-Weir
    Lili Tuggle-Weir
  • Nov 14, 2014
  • 2 min read

Today was a big day for Andrew, he was shaping his own surfboard. Yes, it is going to be cold, but keeping him out of the water for a full year is bad for Lili's health. The morning started out with an hour long bus ride out of Edinburgh into Dalkieth, a beautiful little town. A rainy walk from the bus stop was made better by the area. The shaper who helped Andrew has his shop at Newbattle Abbey College. It is a 16th century abbey that during World War 1 had some out buildings put in that have now been converted into rentals for businesses. There are walking trails all around and it is a wonderful place.

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After a quick look around it was onto the important stuff. Shaping a surfboard sounds easy in concept, you take a foam blank, trace out the design you want your board to look like, carve, cut and plane away foam until it is a surfboard. The problem being, a surfboard is not comprised of lines, but multiple planes that all need to blended together perfectly and seemlessly, or it won't function, or will function, but be quite terrible at performing in any such manner that could be described as fun. With all that being said, first part of the job was to get the important measurements down, length, width of the nose and tail width.

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Next you connect all these points using existing templates until you achieved the desired outline you are looking for. The hard part tends to be keeping everything symetrical, unless you are shaping an asymetrical board and then I don't know what you do.

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After that the fun starts. Cutting the outline, followed by planing down the board till the desired thickness is reached, then adding in features such as concave.

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When you finally get everything roughed in, you can start fine tuning. Rails get roughed, then the bottom gets finished, then back to the deck to blend that into the rough rails, and then slowly and painstakingly blending the top with the upper rail, and the upper rail with the lower rail. While doing all this, one must keep in mind how everything flows with each other, and make sure there are no hard lines, bumps, or worse, dips. If you manage to blend all these elements together, voila!, you end up with a surfboard that hopefully you have made all the correct decisions for and hope it surf immaculately at waves you have never seen break.

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After 6 hrs or shaping, Andrew finally finished his board. It stands at 5'9'' tall, 20'' wide and 2.5'' thick with a nose of 14'' and a nice fat tail at 16''. In the next week or two it will be glassed, while Andrew tracks down some surfers he can bum a ride to the ocean with.

More Soon!

-L&A

 
 
 

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