JUST BUILD IT
With my blanks, resin and cloth in the garage, I studied up on shaping by perusing the web, particularly the shaping and design bulletin board Swaylock's, which is a treasure trove of free information for the first-timer. I read everything I could put my hands on. I watched shaping videos by John Carper and Jim "the Genius" Phillips over and over again. I went to the hard ware store for a sander/grinder, surform, block and hobby planes, sandpaper, gloves, glue and a seemingly endless list of things you'll need if you want to do this. Finally I went out to the garage, built some racks and got to it on my first board.

A couple of tips right off the bat. Make sure your template is good, and by good, I mean not lopsided and bumpy. My first template? Not so good. Dishwasher boxes do not make good templates. I traced out the shape onto the bottom of the blank and cut along the line with a hand saw. My delusions of grandeur (oh, I'll just "recreate" that Rusty I liked so much) were revealed as I looked down at an asymmetrical disaster I'd just made out of one of the last of the Clark foam blanks. Had I put it on eBay the month after I got it, I might have been able to sell it for twice what I paid, instead, I'd turned it into my own little geometry experiment.

Everything in surfing is about curves. From the curve of a swell as it travels across the ocean, to the curve of a set as it appears on the horizon, to the curve of the wave as it hits the bottom and rises up and lifts the surfer, who rides the face and turns in curving arcs. Surfboards are a series of connected curves. The longitudinal rocker, the thickness and foil in the nose and tail and the curve of the rails all need to be continuous, connected curves. I, like most first time shapers, I suspect, was not able to achieve a continuous curve on my rails. So I spent a lot of time trying to bring the bumps in the rail down with my surform and fruitlessly searching for elusive symmetry.

Jim Phillips, in his "Master Shaper" video, calls the surform a crutch tool, and he's right. I shaped my first board entirely with a surform, and it shows. I’m a busy guy, with a demanding job and two small kids, so I worked out in my garage at night after work, a few hours here and there. Over the course of a month or so, I got the board into a state that I thought was passable and got ready to glass. Of course, by this point, it was too cold to glass. Polyester resin will not properly catalyze below a certain temperature, so I waited until spring to discover that the real work in surfboard building lies in the glassing.

If shaping is a geometry experiment, glassing is chemistry. The toxicity of the surfboard manufacturing industry is well documented, and I won't waste time here explaining why. Suffice it to say that that nearly everything used in making surfboards, from the foam, to the resin, the catalyst, the fiberglass, all the cleaners (like acetone), the silica-based buffing compounds to polish with, is in some way harmful to humans. Increasing pressure from OSHA and the threat of civil liability (whether real or imagined by Clark) from workers made ill from manufacturing his blanks, whether real or imagined, are just two of the reasons Grubby Clark gave for closing shop in the long, rambling letter he sent to his customers on Monday, December 5, 2005. Anybody who plans on glassing a board should spend some time familiarizing him or herself with the precautions and dangers of board construction. Be sure you have plenty of rubber gloves and keep the stuff off your skin and, especially, out of your mouth and eyes. Glassing is messy, it is toxic and it is dangerous. It is also fun.

There is something fascinating about the interplay of methyl ethyl ketone peroxide and polyester resin. You can witness the transformation from liquid resin to solid in a matter of minutes. Don't watch for too long though, because as you’re standing there amazed, your resin, mixed with catalyst, is hardening. Its an amazing thing. You drape a long sheet of fiberglass (or two, if your glassing your deck), pour a bucket catalyzed resin, which is about the same consistency of motor oil over the cloth and foam and spread it out over the surface with a rubber squeegee to saturate the cloth. It all seems pretty easy until the resin goes running off the rails in long drips. You then need to fold, or lap, the cloth over the rails. This becomes really difficult at the nose and tail of the board, where the cloth can begin to bunch in large, gooey patches as the resin hardens.

For somebody who has only worked with resin in small batches for ding repair, the transition to using quarts at a time is overwhelming. With my first board, I left way too much cloth at the edges and it hardened in unsightly clumps, which required no small amount of chopping, trimming and sanding when my lamination coat had cured. After laminating the board, all of the bumps, stray fibers and laps of cloth must be knocked down with your surform and a block sander so that the "hotcoat" of sanding resin can be applied to the laminated board. Sanding resin is just laminating resin with a wax additive that can be sanded and polished when fully cured, whereas, without the additive, it stays slightly tacky. After sanding the hotcoat with my variable speed sander/grinder, using a progressively finer grind sandpaper up to 400 wet, I added a gloss coat, which is really just a cosmetic thing that allows you to bring the board to a high polish with wet sanding and buffing compounds. Somewhere between the start of glassing and the end of sanding was the point in the process at which my garage turned from a science lab to a Superfund site. Sanding leaves a very fine layer of fiberglass dust over everything. I can't emphasize enough the need for anybody who plans on doing this to adhere to proper safety precautions. To this end, I removed all the kid's bikes and basically any thing I didn't want covered in fiberglass dust from the garage. I also draped plastic sheeting off the ceiling and the walls to trap the dust in one side of the garage. If I continue shaping, and I reckon I will, since I'm hooked, I plan on framing up a wall to seal off a space in the back of the garage. I figure I could make a space about 6'x14', which is all I really need.

I won't talk about installing fins too much, because there are so many different systems now, whether you glass your fins on, or decide to go with any of the numerous modular, removable designs. Briefly, I went with Futures boxes, which I installed with the help of the inimitable Bryce Nihill, who has been a sage and calming influence on me throughout the steep learning curve (I'm prone to the unnecessary freak out). Futures sells an installation jig with a router that makes installing their boxes, whether before or after you've glassed the board, a snap. Properly placing the boxes on the hull of your board, in order to assure the proper performance of the board, well, that's not such a snap. Especially when your rails are about as symmetrical as an abstract sculpture.

With my fins in, the board glossed an polished, I was the proud owner of a typical first board; a cockeyed, uneven, 8'6" round pin "fun gun." For my first go out, I enjoyed chopped up storm surf in the chest high range and was surprised by the way the board felt, fast and true, racing down the face and finding the pocket with ease. I could feel the water hum over my fins, placed as they were, at an odd angle to the rail. I felt connected to the wave in an incredibly honest way. I felt proud of myself.

Hooked now, but acutely aware of all the mistakes I'd made, I knew I could do better. So I set about scheming and planning for my 10'2". Again, I turned to Bryce for help. One of the biggest mistakes I made on the 8'6", was in the template. For the longboard, instead of a dishwasher box, we used Adobe Illustrator and printed the outline of a round nosed, rockered out round pin with narrow hips. I wanted a lot of thickness through the middle third, but with a foiled nose and tail. The Clark 10'2"Y, designed by Santa Barbara shaper and point break stylist Rennie Yater, does not make the greatest nose rider. Which is OK, because at 6'7" tall and 265 pounds, I don't do a lot of nimble prancing up to the nose. My style, such as it is, doesn't make one think Joel Tudor. Think Kurt Rambis, if he surfed. The stock 10'2 blank has over five inches of rocker in the nose, so I figured I'd go for a sleek longboard I could ride in the lined up point surf near my parents' home in Rhode Island and practice shuffling my size 15 gorilla feet around the deck and making sections.

We printed the template out in pages and tiled them together with scotch tape, then taped the paper to the deck of the board, using the outside edge of the stringer as a guide and traced the outline with a pencil. Just as I had with my first board, I cut the outline with a hand saw, but this time, the rails were much closer to the desired continuous curve. I smoothed out the edges with a tool I made for that purpose and got ready to skin the blank. This time, I would use Bryce's Hitachi power planer, specially modified for mowing foam. It was in using the planer that I came to realize what Phillips meant when he talked about the surform as a crutch. What took me days with a hand plane and surform on my first board, I did in minutes with the planer. And instead of a bumpy surface that required night after night of constant scraping, I had an even hull and deck ready for fine tuning in an hour. Again, I'd timed my shaping poorly, and winter came again, making glassing impossible without a heated space to do it in.

Late fall in the Northeast is like the magic hour, so on those day when surf arrives, you'd rather surf than glass or sand. October turned to November, turned to Winter, and my longboard sat on the racks in my garage, waiting to be glassed. Bryce, coming through again, decided to remodel his basement. With his wife out of town for 48 hours and having a 6'6" channel quad to glass for himself, Bryce made the executive decision to use his basement, gutted and ready for renovation, as a glassing factory for the weekend. So I threw my shaped board in my van, went to his house, and in one long day, we laminated and hotcoated both boards. We experimented with tints, getting a beautiful two-toned green cutlap design on my longboard and doing a straight white tint on his 6'6". I learned more about building surfboards in that one day, than I did building the first one by myself. Having somebody who knows what he's doing assist you go a long way toward making a better board. For the fin, I went decidedly low tech, and put in the ten inch fin box five inches up from the tail by marking out the box on the hull and cutting through the glass with a ruler and utility knife. Then, I took down the stringer and the foam with a chisel until the space was slightly bigger than the fin box. Finally, I measured a square of cloth, cut in four vents and set the box into the hole, which I had filled with a slow batch of sanding resin. Voila.

Between family and work and all of the bullshit those of us who haven't given ourselves completely over to this thing we love suffer through, it was late spring before I finally had the board fine sanded and pinlined and ready for its gloss coat. I felt pretty good about myself. The board looked great, felt great under my arm and I was relishing those final steps of gloss and polish. I put an orange pinline with a smaller green pinline on the deck with paint pens and two small floral stencils with the green paint pen near the nose and tail. The board looked great. But, here's a tip: don't use the DecoColor brand paint pens from your daughter's crayon case to do the skinny green pins on your newly shaped log, especially if your are putting on a gloss coat. Why? Well, I don't know the science behind it (but like I said, it's chemistry), apparently whatever is in that paint is soluble in polyester resin. I did the orange pin with a Posca pen and the green with the Deco pen. They looked terrific, so I went ahead and put on the gloss coat (the pinlines and stencils were totally dry, done the previous weekend). While brushing on the gloss coat, I noticed the green starting to run a bit. Oh well, I thought, too bad. As the paint started to run, especially on the stencils, the lines blurred and I actually thought it looked kind of cool. A happy accident, if you will. However, it was kind of chilly and I was down to the end of my catalyst, so the resin went off cool and slow, with 1% pv instead of what I should have set it off at, closer to 1.75% pv. What does that mean? It means that when I went out to look at my handiwork the next morning, the slow-setting resin had basically lifted all of the soluble green pigment off the deck and run off the rails with the excess resin, leaving almost no green pinline at all and two big green blobs on the deck. Bummer. I couldn't be bothered to sand it down and try again, so I call the board the "grass stain."

For my first go out on the log, I took it to Long Beach and surfed typically gutless early June wind swell in the knee high range. Ironically, I was met in the lineup by Mike Machemer, a friend and lifetime Long Beach local who grew up in nearby Rockville Center. It was an overcast morning and the water was still cold. In the quiet of the dawn, the sound of the chop slapping on the hull of the big board was musical, rhythmic. The board paddled like a dream and slid into the small waves slowly, but as gravity took over and the fin set and the rail stretched out along the face, I knew that the board was good. Mike had a few slides and reported that the board felt good on the rail. I’m sure I was beaming.

Mike had also been shaping over the winter crafting a beautiful diamond tail single out of a 7'3" Rawson blank. He'd gotten the template for a diamond tail single fin from Parmenter, through a connection with surf bard Andrew Kidman, who was traveling in New York and knew Parmenter through is writing and films. Mike shaped the board with Kidman and Brandon "Chicken" Balabus' shed, the "Chicken Coop." This was right around the time I was shaping the grassstain. Mike had recently partnered with his friend, Chris Gentile (a board head if ever there was one) in opening a New York satellite of the Mother Ship of modern surfcraft artistry, Mollusk Surf Shop of San Francisco. In fact, he opened the shop in the same space we had looked at in a Williamsburg warehouse to see about turning into a shaping and glassing space. Instead, the space is now a bona fide surf shop, filled with beautifully built boards of various, eclectic styles, from stubby, twin keeled Chris Christenson twin keeled fish to sleek Mandala quads, Dan-O noseriders to Pearson Arrow thrusters. Why am I telling you all this? Well, in a way, Mollusk NYC, is what brings me to my plea, of sorts.

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