Step deck design

I saw this step deck shapped blank and liked the look.

I had an old polyu blank floating around, so decided to see what it would take to shape and glass it.

I took a parabolic stringer hotwire template and drew that on the blank.

I ran my planer along that line, and it tracked pretty easily. 5 or 6 passes and it had cut the step.

Now comes the hard part, glassing it. I grabbed a small section of 4 oz eglass and taped it to the deck, to simulate being lapped on one rail.

I cut the lap long, so that I would have some excess to play with and then I cut some darts into the excess material.

The glassing was a bit tricky. I scooped some extra into the step itself. The idea was to have something to help hold the glass in there.

I started at the deck, worked down to the bottom, flipped and did the lap. Then, flipped back over, and worked the rails. Then finally, used a squeegee to push along the step. I had to touch up a little on the flat part of the deck and then one last flattening on the bottom.

The step deck could allow a big guy board to have high performance rails, or a standard sized wakesurfer to have super thing rails.

SD, you're like a production line. What are you at now? 3 or 4 boards in a month?

LOL - Judy would banish me to the shop if I ever got that prolific! No, it takes me about 3-4 weeks to finish a board.

Reminds me that one of the virtues of the old school PUPE construction was that you could shape a board in the morning, glass it in the afternoon and ride it the next day. Hacking in to this old school PolyU blank brought back fond memories of that ease in shaping.

LMAO at "I had an old polyu blank floating around..."

JEEZ. When I clean out my garage, DAD, will you come help me set up a shop in it?



(Message edited by notsobueno on March 17, 2009)

You bet! Just shout.

LMAO at "I had an old polyu blank floating around..."

It's true! I "sort of" have a standing order with some of my blank suppliers. If they have a blank that gets damaged and they can't sell it, I'll buy it from them for cheap. For our wakesurfers we just need 4.5 feet of linear foam, so if a 6'2" gets the nose snapped off and it's just 5'8" of busted foam, that's still good for me. The only deal, is I wind up having to inventory the junked blanks until I have a use.