Thursday, October 22, 2015

Recovering and recycling your old boards.

Seamus Miller just sent me the final update on his board building project to share with you. "It's balsa over EPS and was originally a FireWire Tomo Nano that I snapped. It's 5'10 by 19 1/2ish by 2 3/8 ish. I was inspired by a video you posted, from John Parnell back around April/May. "
"The board was originally snapped almost dead centre so I glued it back together with purbond, stripped off the glass, then vac bagged the balsa on. I got the balsa from Mark Riley. I set blocks of balsa into the blank for the fin boxes and leg rope plug. The cedar in the nose and tail is recovered from some mouldings that I pulled off a doorway in our house during some small scale renovations mid way through the board. I glassed it myself, which was a whole other learning experience and probably got a little carried away with the rail tape. There are 6mm cedar strips inlaid into the bottom along the edge of the rail, but the tape mostly covers them."
"It looks like there's swell this weekend so hopefully, I'll get to surf it and see how it goes.

This has truly been an essential outlet for me this year, with my wife diagnosed with cancer back in March and just now coming to the end of chemotherapy. I can honestly say that working on the board has helped me get through the treatment weeks more than I realised at the time. "
"Recovering a board from something that I snapped has made me pretty happy and assuming this one goes alright, I've got a few other recoverables in the shed. I'm very keen to try paulownia over the blank next and am working out how to put channels into it at the moment."

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