Time to shave some wood!

I am amazed how efficient a hand planer is.
I just bought one from Home Depot, 10 bucks, sharpened the blade very well and voila: top notch tool for the poor!

The rails are on!

This week-end I cut and glued the rails from two big balsa sticks. Unfortunately the 2 sticks didn't have the same density, so I have tried to spread the weight evenly between the 2 sides by altering the "rail blocks". Therefore, an uneven wood color is noticeable... I am not very happy about it but at least the board stays balanced.

It start to look like something....

...well almost. The upper deck was glued few days ago and I roughly trimmed the rails tonight. The space for the leash was "routed-out" in the upper deck. I already can tell that the two decks will require heavy sanding to smooth them up. It's a good thing that I love sanding ;-).

Leash Plug.

I will use a plug that have this gortex membrane on the bottom to prevent pressurization and delamination. To vent the board I just drill with the router the space for the plug and on the bottom a little hole should be enough. Well, I hope!

Fin insert

I'm going to use the fusion system from FCS, five of them! So the board will be a quad/thruster. For that, I have cut some piece of balsa blocks and spent quit a long time to adjust them for the board. After gluing them, I have figured out that I should may have been using some thinner one. Let say that I love to sand and I had a lot of love to give on those inserts!!!
After hours and hours of sawing and sanding, everything start to look ok! I am almost ready to close the board with the upper deck!

Who said balsa can’t bend!

It’s time to glue the plank to the frame!

I was a little worried about the rocker: will the balsa plank sustain the bending? Not that the plank were really thick (¼ inches) but they were really glued! The Gorilla Glue makes a bond stronger than the balsa itself, so my nightmares were full of shredded balsa and glue cracks… Surprisingly everything went smooth and easy. Despite the pretty good amount of pressure that it requires nothing cracked (thank you Windex).

Gluing the deck

I have started to glue the deck of the big surfboard.... and WTF again and again and again FYYFF. I can admit the wood may move with the time but I ordered 4 inches wide planks of balsa and none, absolutely none of them were at the right size!!!! I spent that much on precut balsa because I don't have a lot of tools, guess what, I had better order roughly cut lumbers of balsa and start to work with them! So I have try my best with the Dremel to adjust each plank but I end up with spaces of nearly 3 millimeters at some place... I just have to thank Gorilla Glue for expanding and I just have to prey that it will be strong enough to hold everything altogether!
Never mind I am here to learn and I learnt that some source are NOT reliable....ARRRRGHH so frustrating! Anyway, that was my pissed off moment let move on!
So in order to put all the planks as tight as possible, I taped them under pressure the plank adopted a light "u" shape. Then I flipped the all thing over, suspended it from the corner and put some weight over. The result is a "self clamping" force. It is not very strong but it's not bad either!
Here the pattern of the tape (after gluing):