Kneelo on the cover of TSJ

How long has it been since a kneelo has been on the cover of a mainstream surf magazine?

Sensational:

 

Click here to go to TSJ

 

Storm

beat poem by Tim Minchin.

Happy New Year!

Been a while since I posted anything… Been absolutely flat out recently. Report writing time at school, being cross-school coordinator for ESL as well as a fairly full teaching schedule, doing a Masters Degree and looking after a 3 year old boy has left little time to get much else done.

My friend and Bali resident Steve Artis just put together a little video clip of his Earthrise crew of kneelos surfing on Sumba. These are just the outtakes for the real action to come soon:

Click here

Feature music by an excellent Indonesian Blues Band, the Gugun Blues Shelter. Here’s one of their songs from youtube:

Skins on

Grahame’s board after hand shaping the foil and deck contours. A very mild deck concave on this one as it’s going to come in at around 2 1/8 inches in the middle. The rails are akin to a 2 1/4″ board. Reducing volume (but not buoyancy) to try and get more flex in the right places.

Starting all over

Got two boards on the go at the moment a 6′++ for grahame and a 5’11″ for me. Both are very much my own designs  - gaining more confidence.

A few before and after pics of Grahames board.

Foam before:

Foam after cutting:

Balsa before:Balsa after:

A note on using CNC machines. Shaping a compsand board is a multi-step process – you don’t just buy a blank and set about it with the planer for 30 minutes (if only it were that easy!) You cut a bit of foam, shape  a bit, vacuum bag a bit of wood on, shape a bit more, vacuum more wood and glass on, shape a bit more, cut the rails off, vacuum rails back on, shape a bit more, then blend everything together.

The earliest stage of shaping takes place when all the foam parts are flat, without rocker. Doing this by hand is inaccurate, no matter how careful you are. It’s almost impossible to imagine what the rockered board will look like and then shape a foil that matches – you’re basically shaping blind. This is where the CNC machine comes in.

The rectangular block of foam is machined down on an AKU to what is basically a very close tolerance blank. However this is not ‘shaped’ in the sense of a regular Polyurethane blank in a production line that needs only 15 minutes of fine tuning. During the next stage, the blank and bottom skins are vacced on a rocker bed and that is when the bottom contours are added (shaping the rocker bed is another matter entirely!) Then we have some rocker in the blank and can finish shape the deck with accuracy ready to vac the deck on.

An additional reason to use the CNC is that #1 or #3/4 eps is terrible terrible stuff to shape. You have very little control over where foam is coming off. It rips and tears in big chunks. The sanding block or planer often rides up on ball-bearing like beads of foam from previous passes and stops cutting. In short, the less I have to shape the EPS, the happier I am!

So, there’s my excuse for using a machine, haha!

Lene

My wife Lene likes the occasional late drop

 

 

 

 

Pool paint

I enjoyed this. Silly but fun.

Racks

Lene (aka the wife) didn’t want me to drill holes in the floor of my new shaping room (aka the spare bedroom) to bolt down my racks. So I had to come up with another solution. A bit of cutting and welding later, ta-da!

Not quite as sturdy but pretty good. I didn’t want to make the base too wide or I’d be tripping over it all the time.

P.S.

Dave’s ridden his new board in some quality surf and it goes well. Reports are that it’s got ‘all the spring’ – which is what we’re after in this construction – and has guided him through some ‘thumping barrels.’ Meanwhile I’m at home preparing for school next week. This holiday has been a washout!

Been mucking around in photoshop, one more:

 

 

Crystal Voyager

My copy of the film that made me want to ride kneeboards is on VHS and I haven’ been able to find a DVD copy, so this vimeo edit by the Mollusk Surf Shop was a treat.