Sunday, March 7, 2010

Tony Crimmins with a new board under way

Tony started with setting out the outline on his work bench and then setting up the 8mm ( laminated 2 x 4mm) Paulownia stringer. You can see he has used metal brackets to set the stringer up nice and true.
Pretty solid stringer, a great starting point. You only get a good result by making sure you have a good starting point with stringer and frames all nice and true and that they all fit together well.
All Paulownia skins glued up and excess trimmed off.
He has glassed the under side of the deck and the bottom
A bit more strength added in the nose area as there isn't much thickness there when it is all shaped down.
Frames all set up and top rail band on
Extra blocks glued in for the goretex breather to be fitted later
More timber needed for the beefing up of the fin area.
He has trued everything up and made sure it lines up to the outline and that all the frames are level so as to not get any twist. And then he has glued the small pieces of wood on the ends of the frames to hold it all in place.
Glue it up , all hands on deck with the clamps and sand bags. You can only do this if you have everything lined up and in place and locked down and able to take the weight. Otherwise when you add the weight it will twist and distort the frames. Not good.
Deck on. Those small pieces of wood glued on the ends of the frames take the weight of the sand bags and hold everything in place as the glue goes off. Once the deck is on with all those glue points on all those frames , then it is very strong and not going anywhere. Put the time in to fit everything and check that it goes together without lots of effort in a dry run or two to make life easy for yourself. Have all your gear ready. Clamps ready and in easy reach. With this many you may need a spare set of hands as well.With paulownia be sure not to have tha clamps mark the top surface too much as you will have to sand it out. Line the sand bags down the middle of the board to hold the deck skin in place and lined up to your marks. Then clamp away.

Check out Tony's other projects and progress on his blog :
www.tonycrimminstimbersurfboards.blogspot.com

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