Piney Just in Time! (hollow wood surfboard)

16 hours of sanding!

Pics.  Talk later....

The Canoe is Finished! Surfboard, not so much...close

Hey all.  I got fiberglass in my arms.  I can feel it as I type on the laptop.  No worries, I have a Sammy Adams Cherry Wheat Ale.  I was never one for fruity beers, but this one is a WIN!  Reminds me of Frank's Black Cherry Wishniak!

So the canoe is totally ready for the boat show!  YAY!  I have a few pics, not the best because I didn't have much time.  The bulk of the pics will be taken at the boat show.  I'm so stoked!

The surfboard is rough sanded and the fin is on!  That means that all I have to do now is sand out all the scratches, polish it and she is ready as well!  Well, around 130 AM I have to go out and apply more epoxy to the fin.  I'm pretty beat.  This has been a mega challenge and I'm glad I succeeded!  I didn't think that I would get the fin on in time, but thanks to my Milwaukee sander I was able to cut a few corners time wise.  I would have never gotten it finished in time hand sanding it.

Anyway,  here are some pics!

Enjoy!

p.s.  VIS!  where the heck are you?  new phone number or summat?  Tried callin.  Anyway, boat show is thursday thru tuesday.  See you after!  Lates!

My uncle the brass man made the trident and did one hell of a job polishing that brass eyelet too!

 YO CORK!  Nice boat dude!

Glassing the Hull (adventures in epoxy)

More Beer Tastings!

Goose Island Nut Brown:

Fantastic!  This is one tasty nut brown from Chicago!  This is a new favorite!

It lives up to everything it says on the bottle.  Rich Dark Malts. Notes of chocolate, honey and caramel.  Smooth and delicious!  I give this beer a TEN!

I had this last night after my posting on here.

 Bel Haven Scottish Ale.  Kind of reminiscent of Newcastle in that it has that skunk aroma. Hey, they put it in a clear bottle.  They must be looking for that flavor.  I would actually prefer to try this on tap because I think it would be much better non-skunky.  Not that it was bad, but I guess some folks like that in a beer.  Otherwise it had great drinkability!

 And for tonight's beer....Anchor Steam Breckles Brown.

OMG, this is quite a good beer from Anchor Steam.  I have a romatic love of Anchor Steam.  I don't know why, they just attract me.  It's the name, the aura...

This is a perfect brown.  Not as creamy as that Goose Island Nut brown, but more like a pure brown but using citra hops.  It is dedicated to their first brewmaster and perhaps that lends to my historical attraction to Anchor Steam.  This beer gets a TEN from me as well.  I think I'm a brown head.

And now to the surfboard.  The epoxy, she is not playing nice.  I am plagued by bubbles and pits.  I have one hot coat on the deck (that is the coat after the lamination and fill coats that is supposed to be the final finish coat) and I still have some major bubbles and pits.  Not as bad.  I have to have a decent finish coat on there tonight so at 11 PM I got to go and put another on and what happens happens.  I will sand like the Devil.

The fin is coming along.  I don't think I will have it laminated for the show.  I would like to, and maybe I will, but I am not going to worry about it.  I will stick it in place with bubble gum!

More pics!

The fin is coming along.  I have both sides done now and she is ready to be sanded!  Yay!

 My inscription blurred...

 The lamination coat always looks so promising!  Love it!

 Bow view of the deck lamination coat...

 Logo looks good.  Notice mini craters?

 Mega mini craters.  Worst section along the rail.  Next go around I am going to smother them in epoxy!!!!

 Not very smooth, but that is what sand paper is for!

 I knew I was going to have to sand so this really is NOT so bad.  I am an excellent sander and polisher!  It's just elbow grease!  I pray to Gaia that I will be finished by Wednesday night!

Send out those good vibes!  Later!

Glassing My Hollow Wooden Surfboard (Frantic City "braaack!")

Yo!

Hope all of you are having a nice summer!  Second day into summer and the weather is freaking great for varnishing the canoe!  I managed to squeeze that into my schedule yesterday and today in between epoxying the surfboard and such.  I'm on my 3rd 16 hour work day with like an average of 4 hours of sleep a night trying to get "the Piney" ready for Mystic.  It seems that there is always something to hold me up.  Yesterday it was the fin.  The fin that I want to use is from Geoff McKonly.  He made it from a Schmidts beer barrel and it looks really cool as well as a piece of history.  Well I started prepping it yesterday and fiberlassing it, but it was foiled a bit wide at the nose and was too round, so I sanded it today and am going to make it into more of a "D" shaped fin.  I don't know if it will be finished in time for the show.  Another hitch is that when I was fiberglassing the board today, the second coat, the "fill coat" (one that fills all the gaps in the fiberglass weave) left a bunch of the weave standing on end.  I have never seen that happen before!  And just as I did the fill coat on the fin, the same thing happened.  Anyone know what this is?  On both occasions there was ample time for the epoxy to set as I am pretty anal about the chemical bonding between layers.  It just means an extra coat and more sanding.  TIME

After  work last night I decided to do a taste test of porters.  My favorite style of dark beer.  Or one of them.  Well, a good style of beer.  ha ha ha

I started off with a Dominion Baltic Porter.  It was good.  I liked it.  It's a lager style porter with supposed tastes of licorice and toffee.  A little of the chocolate came out, the dark specialty malts and the rye were most apparent to me.  It was kind of dry.

And then I had my love.......Deschuttes Black Butte Porter.  OMG I fancy that beer over the Dominion any day.  All I gotta say is CREAMY.  I'm all about anything creamy.  From what I understand I have Philly Beer Week to thank for Deschuttes now being in the local refridgerators!  NICE ONE PHILLY!

Surfboard Pics:

The Nose (after final shaping)

 Pretty crisp lines, could have been better.

 Prepping the fin the first go around.  Was too round on leading edge.

 Two layers of 6oz. weave.  Heavy,  but I figured I had lots of sanding anyway.

 "Swingin' from the Gallows Pole"

 Lots of cosmetics needed to be addressed by filling with epoxy and sawdust.

 6 oz. weave deck pad to strengthen the deck.

 6 oz. weave full deck cover. Hole cut out for taped over leash plug.

 Taped off just below the bottom edge of the rail.  I was experimenting.

 Lamination coat.  LOOKS GREAT!

 Nose looks good.

 Hot coat, after the fill coat.  See how rough it is?  WTF???  I did a "Mesingw" design with pigmented epoxy using contact lens solution bottles to squirt it on.  Mesingw is the Lenape "Keeper of the Game".  His duties are to see that there is a balance in nature and enough game for the people to eat.  He is like the first environmentalist in Philly.  So I did the design after the fill coat was settling in.  The colors ran into the weave.  I knew it would happen.  I'm not happy with my drawing, not the bleeding.  That I can fix with painted outlines later.

 Reshaped fin.  Leading edge is less round.

 I have a feeling that the tape that I used to dam up the epoxy is going to be a real pain in the arse to remove.  F@ck!  Wax paper sucks too!  The visqueen is best to use as a cover.

And tonight I am enjoying a Dogfish Head Aprihop!  Dogfish Head is by far my favorite brewery.  It's not about the beer.  I have only had a few, really.  I'm jiving with the attitude.  They are big.  But they behave like a homebrewer.  That is what I like.

Aprihop is a fine beer.  I do get a sense of apricot AND mild side hops.  It is one of the more mild IPA's and along my lines of drinkability.  Many IPA's I will stop after the first one to recover from the bitter.  I can deal with Aprihop!

Everyone, have a great Saturday night!

Love, Sean.

Two Days of Sand...(sanding a hollow wood surfboard that is, no beach fun, yet!)

Hi internet land!

It's a surfboard!  Yup, it's fully shaped and ready to be glassed.  It's been a struggle in this heat with the other projects going on.  An air-conditioner project took 4 hours as the window frame in the shop that I was installing it in broke free of the concrete wall and I had to anchor the frame to the concrete.  That's life in an old building.  You live and learn!

Well, "The Piney" took about 20 hours of sanding in the last two days with various equipement.  None of which I took pictures of.  Sorry, I was way to busy to take the time.  In fact, all you are getting in the way of pictures are crappy ones from my phone.  I'm curious as to why they suck so bad on blogspot, but look great on my hard drive.  meh...  Oh wow!  I just figured out how to view the pics better.  For me I have to right click and hit view image and then i can click on it and it expands!  neato!  Try it!

So, sanding.  I started sanding with the disc sander.  I have a huge milwaukee sander/grinder that works wonders for taking off meat.  The rules for sanding are as follows:  You start with the coarsest grit sand paper always sanding in the same direction.  In this case, the length of the board.  Then you use the next finer grit sandpaper in increments.  Sand the same direction.  This process is repeated over and over to remove the scratches from the previous sanding sometimes all the way to a grit sandpaper of 2000 (in the case of polishing).  In this case I just went from 60 grit on the grinder to 60 grit on orbital sander (mostly to sand the tail and nose blocks as it is a great way to take off meat as well, but it does not sand flat) to 60 grit on the Hutchins Straightline power sander (which sands really flat and in nice straight lines) to 80 grit on the Hutchins to 80 grit on the hand held block sander to do everything from getting the deck completely flat to fine tuning the curvature of the rails.  Sanding is a tedious process, but when done properly will make an impression on those who look at the finished product.

Deck

 Hull

Much tired, Have a great night!

Dentures for the Piney

Hey everyone!

Yesterday was fathers day so we varnished in the AM for a little then spent the rest of the day chill-laxin.  I BB-Qed up a bounty for the Old Man and everyone and had a blast watching Pawn Stars.

Today I removed the clamps from the Piney while my Dad put the seats into the canoe.  Kindred Spirit is looking great now!

After I removed the clamps I busted out the Festool Planer and went to town on the deck.  With a brief interlude of lunch at Tijuana Flats with my good friend Bobby Holmes I then went back to planing the board.  I wanted to get a rough idea of the shape of the rails at the nose and tail so I could get ready to glue the nose and tail blocks on.  So I focused on a rough shaping of the deck starting with the Festool planer, then the hand plane and finally some sanding.  While moving the board around I noticed a rattling inside.  

***Note To Self***  Tack down those shims on the frames!

Using some geometry I drew out where I wanted to cut for the Nose Block and proceded with various tools to get it good.  The Japanese pull saw to cut the straight lines, and the Jig saw to cut the curve.  I went wide with the curve cut and then touched it up with ye olde metal grinder.  It gets in places most other tools cannot.  Why not use it?  To fine tune the curve I used a small wood block and sand paper to get a nice crisp line.  It was a very time consuming process.  About 3 hours.

Here is the board fresh from off the clamps.

Yuck Mouth!

 Some rudimentary planing.

 My surfboard is going to have a nice smile.

First I had to shape the dentures,

then I had to draw it out on the board.

Finally I did the cut out.

 No more yuck mouth!