Tricks of the Trade

The information presented here is abbreviated, partial, and, most of all, just one man’s take. Excuses in advance to those whose own knowledge makes mine seem embryonic.

Stage One: Plan shape

It’s easy to wander off course. Stay tuned in. Simply drawing the outline to reflect a desired performance theory seems easy enough. Narrow versus wide. Flat versus rockered. Upward nose curves avoid plowing—too much pushes water. Hard lower edges allow sudden flow release. Square corners become pivot points. Curves facilitate line bends. Fins and edges help hold the face. Deeper concave closer to the rail means more hold. The combinations begin to sort themselves out and group together into strategies. 

Figure out the appropriate overall widths, foot by foot along the line. Mark them identically in a progression of dots on either side of the board’s stringer, and align the template in stages through the dots, one side at a time, end to end, being careful to mark the line in a manner where changes in holding the marker don’t cause sudden changes in the resulting line’s flow. Trace the useful segment of the template until the functional segment of the line is accomplished. Smoothly connect the dots. A “single template” outline works for the board it was cut for, but a good line or segment can be adapted well to different measurements and/or outlines. Segments of more than one template are frequently blended to build an unbroken end-to-end flow.

Drawing the line should incorporate a similar technique every time. When cutting the outline with a hand saw, many prefer to sweetly flow the cut a small distance away from the drawn line, allowing a margin of excess foam for smoothing and adjusting the line with sweeping strokes of a block plane or sanding block held straight up and down. An important key is keeping the cutting edge’s top line precisely the same as the bottom. The longitudinal flow of the cut should be unbroken from end to end. Resist masking cutting-tool wobbles that reveal themselves in the top or bottom lines by blending them into the plan shape. They will minimize during the continuation unless severe, in which case removing the rail section containing the wobble and replacing it with a faired-in block of foam is the fix. You quickly learn to avoid that error. When both sides are tuned and finished, the board will begin to reveal itself.

Stage Two: Adjusting overall rocker and thickness

Start by establishing the bottom, then shape the top to it—the bottom being the planing surface, the top defining the thickness flow. The top and bottom decks can require the removal of relatively large amounts of foam. Evenly remove the material in patterns—much like mowing a lawn. The progressive steps up or down in thickness over the length of the board are then blended into a continuous line of curves and relative straights as appropriate. You also can taper bands by adjusting the depth of a planer blade with your front hand as you progress along your pass, but this is pretty zen-like.
It comes over time.

Stage Three: Turning the rails

Like turning a ship’s mast, this is begun by cutting banked planes longitudinally in the blank’s upper and lower outline corners. Bisect the resulting corners with additional planes of specific width, depth, and appropriately tapered ends that increasingly reflect the endpoint; the square becomes a faceted matrix of smoothly beveled planes. Tops and bottoms are individually done—first tops, then bottoms, one after the other—again trying to identically match the curves and straights on each side.

The knack is to replicate your steps, your tool’s angles, and the movement sweeps done to each side of each phase. The (ordinarily high-to-low) rail line will be reflected by the outermost remaining vertical margin of the original outline. Its ratio of top-to-bottom height along the flow represents a fraction of shape theory that allows you to read what you are doing. As you are working while standing, the front of the board on one side of you and the back on the other, replicating the angles of the cutting blade while using different body attitudes is essential. Unless you are precisely aware of the movement, extending your arms while shaping the front side or back side will produce mildly to radically different effects. The key is to concentrate on controlling the attitude of the actual cutting blade, whichever way you use it, rather than the overall tool.

[Feature image: Simon Anderson. Photo by Dean Wilmot.]