Happy diamond jubilee Liz

To celebrate the diamond jubilee (or more accurately the extra bank holiday we've been given) I've decided to build my own royal yacht, in this case a five foot and a bit mini Sim. The four day weekend should mean I can get the whole project done and dusted in one go.

To kick the project off I have just finished glassing up some balsa fins and cutting out the template. Will be flying across the warm summer waves before I know it :)

Finished my holiday pics

After just 9 months I've finally finished sorting through all the photos from my trip to Africa, through Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. Lovely place, I can recommend it. 


African Photos Flickr Stream

Really Missing Waves Now

I guess the one good thing about this extended flat spell we're experiencing lately is that it's finally given me the impetus to get started on the Roy Stuart designed 'Original Sim' I've had on my to-do list for quite some time now. 

• Roy Stuart Original Sim Blog
• Original Sim 'How to' Manual

This is going to be a bit of a freebie project as all the wood used in the construction of this board is scrap paulownia from other projects, so that's nice. Still have to fork out for some epoxy resin to hold it all together though so it's not completely polar bear friendly.


At any rate I've cut out a fibre board template, wood for the deck strips and frame has now been milled after a marathon table saw session (still need to strip deck planks down the middle but put that off for the time being) and all the frame blocks have been cut out so next step is going to be glueing the frame together. With any luck this will have to be put off for a while because some swell will arrive. Not holding out much hope though.

Bit of fun for summer like

Been liking the idea of Tom Wegener's Tuna board (Tuna's at T-Tree) for a while now, look like some good fun in the small summer waves, but was put off slightly by the £500 price tag on Magic Seaweed so thought I'd have a shot at making my own. 

In an effort to make it as cheap as possible I cobbled a blank together out of a sheet of loft insulation foam, chopped up and glued back together and rather than a traditional centre stringer, added a 1 inch thick band of balsa around the circumference of the board to give the board more strength as well as adding a bit more volume (it was a pretty small sheet of foam). 


The design was shaped very closely to Tom Wegener's design (sorry Tom) with a large single concave and hard boxy rails. The limitations of using a flat block of foam with no centre stringer glued in meant it has slightly less nose rocker. I also added a bit of a concave in the deck for the first time, been reading that it assists slightly in flex properties of the board as well as giving a more stable prone platform for paddling and a more natural grip when standing (bit like a skateboard deck).


At any rate, being that the foam was pink and the balsa included some of the grotty scraps of balsa I got from an ebay job lot, I added yellow pigment to the fibreglass job. Initially I wanted a Caterham style '7' logo but unfortunately couldn't find one so doesn't look as much like a Caterham 7 as I would have liked.


As you'd expect, since finishing this board the waves have varied between non-existent and exceptionally poor but based on the one time I have managed to get the board out so far I am genuinely pleased to be able to say it works! At 5'3 long, 17" wide and 2" at it's thickest it is by far my smallest board (paulownia alaia aside but I've never been particularly successful on that so hardly a fair comparison) and my initial attempts at trying to push myself into waves certainly led to some doubts at first, but when I decided to man up and paddle out back and catch waves properly it seemed to come into itself.


The large concave into twin V's at the rails seemed to give it the trait of wanting to turn all the time so found that if you shift weight to counteract that then the board became a surprisingly stable take off platform, certainly more so than my wooden alaia. The junky waves on offer didn't have the power to for any fast waves but it's certainly given me a taste for it's potential. I think me and the Seven are going to have some fun this summer!