How to Make a GoPro Arm Strap!

Cut it fine with this one. Heading to France on a snowboarding trip in a few hours and being that my snowboarding experience currently extends to two hours in sunny Wales it wouldn't make for the most exciting snowboarding footage. Being that I still wanted to capture some of my trip I thought I'd make up for my lack of snowboarding skillz with some interesting camera angles.

The bicep strap was an idea I saw on the Swaylocks GoPro thread and had been thinking about this for a while, especially with regards to how else this strap could be used, e.g. on the ankle, on the lower thigh etc.  With this in mind I decided to modify the technique I developed with the wrist strap to come up with an adjustable bicep strap, so here we go!

1.   Find an object that sits somewhere between the circumference of your arm and your lower leg, in this case a tin of varnish. Glue some sheets of balsa wood together, two large squares and two smaller squares (big enough for a GoPro mount), and tape to the tin.

2.   Once dry trim the rough edges and flatten the top to fit the mount. In my case I chose the aluminium screw mounted device I found on ebay, this allows me to change the direction of the mount if for example I wanted to hold my arm perpendicular or mount it on my leg straight down.

3.   Tidy up the balsa to make it nice and smooth, and cut out the slots for the strap and drill holes. Fibre glass the whole thing which will greatly strengthen the holder.

4.   When top coating the glass stick down strips of neoprene and trim once dry.

5.   Tidy up the neoprene with some fancy stitching, and while you're at it sew in some 2 inch webbing and a 2 inch plastic buckle (available in your local DIY store). Maybe even do a neater job than me?

6.    Screw on your mount, just pretend that I'd had time to cut down the bolt length. If your going to use a stick on mount it's probably best to follow what I did with the wrist strap to make it secure.

7.   Attach your GoPro and go nuts! Some video footage to follow when I get home I hope!

The Beginnings of the Cobra

Juggling quite a few little projects at the moment, none of them really up to any standard worth writing too much about yet, but my biggest current project is a new hollow, wooden surfboard that's been on the drawing board for quite a while now.

It's going to be a 5'10" single fin made from tulipwood with twin obeche stripes, imagine the AC Cobra below complete with the twin Shelby racing stripes, that's the intention of this design. Basically wanting a small fast board with some cross your fingers handling. Love the feel of the pivoting carves of the 9 foot Winky, but want to transfer that feeling into a smaller, more manageable board.

Haven't gotten too far with this yet but the design is finalised and the spar and ribs stuck down onto some plywood. Currently milling some wood strips and hoping the days start getting longer soon and the weather starts to get a bit friendlier so I can getting more work done.

The Patriot 4

Well it's been nearly a year now since I last worked on my Lil' Patriots (Patriot 2, Patriot 3) so feel it's long over due that I revisit this project. Haven't really thought about it for a while but having recently purchased an interesting new surfboard from Gee-Spot Surfboards which is kind of inspired me to take the board in a new direction.  

It's a similar build concept, being balsa covered EPS foam under epoxy, though gone a bit fancier with the stringers, nose and tail blocks but more interestingly for me is in the rails.

Unlike the majority of my surfboards, and indeed the preceeding Patriots, the rails on this one a really quite thin. This along with an article which has recently re-surfaced on Swaylocks, http://www.swaylocks.com/forums/thick-board-skinny-rails, has got me to thinking how this could be integrated into my Patriot design.

I've previously realised that buoyancy and wave catching has never really been a problem with the Patriot design which I feel allows me to go a lot more extreme with the volume. With my new solid balsa board being aimed largely at surfing small clean waves I'm now seeing an opportunity for creating a paipo-styled bodyboard more adept in larger steeper waves which is where a thinner Patriot with a lot more rocker could be suited.

So my first practical consideration when designing the 4 is the fact that most of the strength of the last two builds has been in the parabolic balsa rails; with a lot of volume taken out of the rails strength will be greatly compromised.  

To take account of this then I've re-profiled the board in Aku Shaper and come up with two designs, of slightly varying thickness and rocker, and transferred them onto paulownia stringers (still want to keep the design as light as possible) which should add a huge amount of structural integrity. 

Scrubbing Up the Lil' Sim

It's always a bit heart wrenching when you take a lovely glossy epoxy coat and sand it back down to a dull matte but ultimately it's for the greater good. Managed to fit the fin and leash plugs during the week, which was a pain in itself because I lost my darn spade bits. Nice to finally see it finished now after a few hours ruining my arms with the sander this weekend. Need to get a couple of fancy photos of her in the next few weeks then get her in the water, can't wait to see how she goes!

Waiting for glass to dry

Okay then. a quick update on how the balsa board is going. Glassing has finally been finished today, bit of a cock up glassing the bottom where I sanded through the glass in two spots as a result of not removing masking tape in time and having a nightmare trying to remove it but in the main part she's looking good! Still got fin and leash plugs to set which I'll do one evening this week and all things going well I'll give it a final sanding and polish her up next weekend, looking forward to seeing the finished article now.