Tuesday 29 January 2013

Balsa Board - Coming Together Nicely

With the snow gone and the weather warmer (Saturday was surprisingly nice) I've managed to get the balsa board to a stage of near completion. Rounded off the nose and widened the nose spoon to the edges. The aim with the nose spoon is to reduce some weight by scooping out some volume at the top third where it's not really needed which should also make duck diving easier. I've left more volume through the middle third where most of my weight should be when paddling it, the tail has been pulled up at the back third to add more rocker.




On the base I've gone for a somewhat experimental four stage arrangement with a belly at the front to cut into the water more easily, leading to a flat planing area to build up speed. This in turn gradually leads to a large centre concave before two channels lead inward for the last quarter in the style of my foam bodyboard and similar to the channels on my Catch Surf Beater board. The base also curve upwards towards the rail by about a centimetre from about 7 cm in, similar to the Beater and The No 7 I made last year.  The aim is to have a board that is more than competent finless with the option of adding two small, single FCS tab side bite fins that I will whittle up at a later date.




At any rate the board is essentially complete now, planning on spending a bit of time tidying up some rough areas then sanding the whole thing up to a high grit before hopefully glassing it this weekend all things going well!





No comments:

Post a Comment