next »

[soulvoid]

Hi,

I'm wondering if any of you guys are building your board flat like Paul showed with wood rails? I'm wondering how thick wood could be used when you are bending in more rocker and how much spring back you get. Seems to me it would be quite a bit easier attaching the rails and saving some wood when you only have to cover the thickness and not the rocker in width.

[Kit Sidwell]

I pretty much use the thickness of wood required to let you round the rails without cutting into the deck skin too much and thinning it out at the rail join.
Springback does happen, just gotta figure out ways of minimising it or accounting for it - for example using PVC rails, and avoiding cedar rails or other stiffer woods.

I've been thinking about it, and sort of come to the conclusion that it's a quick way of building a board for a backyarder, or a repetitive board maker like firewire, but it's not quite so attractive to the high-end board builders.
There's ways of doing full rockered boards just as fast, I know Huie doesn't use flat board, and he churns 'em out!
Shaping a flat blank is wierd, I don't thing it'll ever be as easy or as accurate as shaping a board will rocker, for me at least. It's much harder to get the result you truly want, harder to visualise.

[Jarrod]

I have done them, and still do them, both ways.   There are trade-offs to both techniques.

There is the issue of springback, but it has been relatively minor for me so far.   I've been able to fix any rocker issues during the outer glassing phase by bagging it to to rocker bed again once the epoxy is just cured enough to handle.   You can also over-shoot your target rocker once you figure out exactly how much a given shape is going to springback.

The biggest issue that I've had with doing it flat is with bottom contours.   Since the rocker gets set when the deck skin goes on, if you bag your blank to the rocker table to attach the deck skin (rocker table INSIDE of bag with board), you run the risk of pressing your bottom concaves flat against the rocker table.   This can be avoided by using contour mats like bert demonstrated, but I haven't gotten around to making any.   The other way to do it is to just bag the board when doing the deck skin, and then press the bagged board down onto the rocker bed with weights (rocker table OUTSIDE of bag with board).   I don't think this forms the board to the rocker bed as "true" as if they're both bagged together, however.

Again, that can be solved by using contour mats or by making boards with flat bottoms.

When doing boards with complex bottoms (like bonzers, etc..) I've still been using curved blanks.  That way I don't have to worry about the rocker along with everything else.

[huie]

sol
            the flat board is ok there are a few different ways  to do the rails

    best to work out a system that suits you &work whith that
 i do things far different because as a shaper i have to have hands on.

i cant  stand a bloody pump telling me what i can do.  haahaa