Be Green & Flow: Work Begins on "The Piney" all reclaimed wood surfboard

Howdy blogosphere!

Today was a busy day. I cut 4 lawns and used my new Echo 230 grass trimmer/brush cutter. If you are looking for a weed whacker, don't get anything smaller than that baby! It handles it all. It's owned by Shindawa now which is OK with me because they are the leader in cleaner emissions with their products.

My dad progressed more on the canoe gunwales by drilling the rest of the holes. I will get to sanding them and getting them ready to be put on the canoe tomorrow.

I played around with a couple different ideas for this 10' surfboard and struggled with what I should do for the Mystic Woodenboat Show. I decided to use all reclaimed lumber for the board. I'm pretty sure that it is all pine. The red stuff might be redwood. It's possible, but I'm banking on mostly pine. It's heavier. Noticeably heavier than cedar. It's also gummier. Both will be hurdles in making this board. It can be done, it will be done. I'm going to trim those planks thin! I'm also going to douse them with Ethanol like mad! Get 'em good and drunk and "weeze the juice" out of those jammers so that the epoxy will stick. -Pauly Shore reference.

I have some really nice lumber that I just put aside for this gig, but I think this board will be worth it. My friend Mike Geno, the world renowned cheese and bacon artist, is going to help me with some graphics and I think that will really tie the board together - Big Lebowski reference.

Check out the deck and hull planks:

You can't really see the color with this camera, it's only 1 megapixel, but there are some nice colors in there. These are the planks for the deck. For me, the deck isn't the focus of design on a surfboard. I'm going against tradition with that theory. My logic is that the deck gets scummed up with dirty gritty surf wax, so why make it the nicest surface. So I chose the least attractive boards for the deck. Traditionally the deck is where you make your mark artistically. But I don't want this board to hang on the wall. I want toes to hang over the nose!

I'm down with making the hull "snap", maybe I should use the word "pop" like I should. Snap + surfboard = a trip to the surf shop to buy another board traditionally. The planks that I'm worried about most with this board are those two center ones with the pinstripe going down the middle. They look really resinous. That can pose a problem for epoxy adhesion. I haven't studied epoxy adhesion to pine yet. I might spend a few hours doing that before I glue these puppies together.