I'm admiring the ground up builds by Show, Salty Oysters, Smed, Jon and others. We are all mostly building from EPS block foam, hotwiring shapes. Cutting and gluing up strnigers. I am about to mold some HD PolyU rails so that my blank has multi-densities.
What we are doing is expectionally labor intensive and outside the realm of "profitable" board building on any significant scale.
It seems to me that we can remove ourselfs from those constructs also.
Most purchased blanks come with glued up stringers of basswood, or PVC. The shaper then trims the stringer along with the board.
I followed Show's failure on one glue up and he swiped the stringer from that donor to use, I think as a template.
It occured to me that since we are making our blanks we could use different stringer material. If we already know the final dimensions of our board, we could shape or mold our stringers, beforehand, of materials that might be more benefical. Carbon,Coremat and epoxy like Vernor, or what about fiberglass/epoxy like most fins? For perimeter stringers they could be molded for the final shape.
I wonder what would gives us the best results?
If I want to duplicate this shape...I could scavange the stringer, including the "bend" and mold a fiberglass stringer - say 1/16"...maybe vary the taper/thickness in areas I wanted stiffer. If we are building from the ground up and aren't particularly concerned with profitability we aren't shackled to previous practices.
The start of my HD rail mold. If I use pour foam in the mold and a preshaped stringer, I could mold the foam directly to a pre-fabbed stringer. Possibly even molding the high density rails in the process.
Linear Mode
