Stage IIIing Still

So very close...Final photos tomorrow, ride report this weekend!

The board bends about 2.5" in hand from the widepoint to the tail, with one person holding the nose down and the other torquing on the tail.  The 2.5" is from flat, so when it's twisted the corners of the tail can actually have about 5" of difference...I'm pretty impressed with it and that i actually got the flex I was looking for; now it's just time for the real deal testing!  You can even grab it from about 12" from the tail and twist the board from that point as well, meaning that a lot of the flex is coming from the center of the board as opposed to the tail alone.

The materials seem to really have a clear resonance through the board, you can twang the fin and the vibrations carry all the way through the nose and make a really unique sound compared to other material combinations.

I'll take a video of it hanging out in the racks and twisting a little to post with the finished pics!

Big Cat Pat

Big Cat Pat is on a path to enlightenment within surfing.  

Raised in the chop hopping center of the world.  He has recently said WTF, OMG, and most likely FML when it comes to surfing thrusters and other hyper rockered out thingamajigs.

The B.C.P. stumbled into my shop after an outrageously excited string of emails and a three day marathon in which he reportedly read EVERY blog post I've ever made...respect.

Looking to push his hull into some serious juice and nutbusting-bottom turns, Big Cat is piquing my curiosity and  I am proud to have been a base-step in this most magical journey...so here's Pat's 7'1 modified Hullibut...

Big Cat Pat says hulls FTW!

By the way, this board glows in the dark.  seriously.  I'm not kidding.  Seriously.  No, really it does.  It glows.  In the dark.  Yah.

NO IM SERIOUS!  

LOOK!

Whatever, if you don't believe me, psh.  It does.  and Pat won't be able to sleep anymore for multiple reasons:

1) There is a neon green glowstick that's 7'1" in his room.

2) There is a good chance the board is in his bed.

3) The is an even better chance that this situation may piss off his girlfriend.

4) Despite 1-3, there are no waves.

3's Company

Top to bottom...Alex's She Hull and Ben M's Gull, both heading to the UK, and Amy P's Miniglider, off to Maine!

RedRoom

Cap'n Nick Cook by James Kamo...............sure.

How To: Flex Spoon

Watch and learn as Connor and I build his first flex spoon:

Connor Spooning from Ryan Lovelace on Vimeo.

I hope you learned something.

Kevlar Progress

Three Stages...

Kevlar layed up, then with 2oz fiberglass over the top:

Then saturated with resin and covered in peel ply to bleed the excess resin into the bleeder cloth (cotton kinda stuff) as the pressure of the bag squeezes the laminate:

and a fuzzy picture of the final laminated deck after the peel ply and bleeder were removed:

Curing overnight...will get to bend it tomorrow!

the Stage III

Here we go...time for me to get into some details...

This board has been circling my head now for about two months; but it's a project as a whole that's been a nagging question for me since my first experiments with this type of particular flex about four years ago.

What I'm after is a kind that twists around the center of the board, changing the outline, rocker and projecting out of turns with the same type of motion as a Flex Spoon.  Imagine a rail line lifting from the tail; altering the rocker curve and outline, then when unloaded, springing back to it's normal shape....Awesome.  I know.  

The problem is with a surfboard's thick center, you can't take the same theories that the spoons use (think: a tuning fork shape of stiffness around a flexible center) to achieve the same flex pattern; it's totally backwards and only stiffens the board (think: the greater the distance between two laminates, the stiffer the part will be).

I've been through the parabolic stringer thing and I'm not sold, it's not as flexy as I want...just not enough for me and what I'm thinking of.  This brings me back to where I started.  Here is my new project-in-progress; I've named it Stage III.  

I built a 1/8" thick Paulownia skin that is shaped to use the nose and tail areas of the board to act as a torquing forces around the weaker center.  That was then sucked into the area that I routed out of the deck so it would sit flush:

In the bag ^

After removing it from the bag the board felt way too stiff so I did some brainstorming and took the volume out of the sides of the board, in order to lessen the distance between my final laminate layers.  This will be replaced with EVA foam after glassing:

That got the board much much closer, but it didn't blow me away until I decided to route the center out of the paulownia patch to allow the shape to work as two individual arms instead of one twisting body.  the strength nose-to-tail is 99% unaffected, but allowing MUCH more twist.  That cavity was then filled back in with EPS foam:

This thing threw me for a loop today but with a whole lot of brainstorming it's transformed into something more than I could have thought up.  I've gotten too deep into the 'plan' with some earlier boards, this one i've decided to work as I go and see what I can do on the fly and work as I go with the flex pattern.

Tomorrow I'll be bagging the deck Kevlar and 2oz fiberglass on...I'm so pumped....

Supaspesh

Connor and I have been workin' it out over at the glass shop on some REALLY cool boards for the past week...

Lots of good tunes have been played, and some sweet colors have been layed.......sssstoked!

Adventures in V-Baging

As i mentioned a little bit back, I am underway on my next experimental board; this one involved lots of kevlar, resin-x, 2oz fiberglass, stringerless EPS, paulownia wood, and a vacuum bag...more descriptive posts will follow :)

Step 4!

Step 1) get a hull

Step 2) ride it

Step 3) gather your thoughts

Step 4) write me an email...

here is Eric's email from yesterday:

"Ok I am finally writing this because I finally got to get a taste of
the red board on the kind of wave it does its magic at...
rode malibu - I have to say, I am embarrassed to say, I think I got
one of the funnest waves of my life on it -- on a crowd-gone-home,
dark evening lined up
(besides my first wave ever as a kid, going straight in hawaii).

Damn that board is epic.  This is a very special surfing, surfing
points on such thin railed, forward, flat, awake foiled dreams.  (for
those of us who like to surf small waves, and with feet somehow
parallel, in some psychedelic and remembered death kind of way, chop
up the babylon flavor in a metaphorical meditation

Thank you!  I can't wait to get it out to a long lined up point again,
some midweekday.

Irie,
Eric"