Let's Make a 12 Layer Surfboard

When I was looking around online to see how others have built there own surfboards I saw tons of examples with people trying all kinds of things. The vast majority of people were taking two full pieces of EPS Insulation foam, gluing them together and then laying them on another surfboard to create their rocker (The amount of curve to the surfboard). They would then shape their wooden stringer to match up, cut the foam in half and glue them back together with the Stringer in the middle. This sounds like a great way to do it if you have another surfboard (Which I don't) and some power tools to shape the Stringer (mine are all back in Phoenix, Az right now). So I had to come up with another way to do it.

Luckily, I saw a build where a guy cut out his Stringer, just like I did in the last post, and then used this wooden piece as a template to cut out the pieces of foam. This is how I decided to do it. I think it will be the easiest way for me to get this first board shaped.

If you aren't exactly sure what I'm talking about maybe this image will help it make more sense:



As you can see, you basically are just taking vertical cross sections of the board 2" at a time and gluing them all together. I didn't really have any problems here. Just make sure that you take the metallic layer and plastic label layer off the foam first. I just laid my stringer down on my foam, marked the outsides with a sharpie and cut them all out. No worries!

Then I started layering my foam pieces. I would put some glue on both sides of foam, smear it around and then put them together to sit for a few minutes. Then move on to the next layer. Now here's where I had a little snag. I was using Glue-All Elmer's Glue. And I only grabbed one bottle at Lowes. This was not even close to enough. I used up a whole bottle right before I got to the wooden stringer. So I had to let this half sit for the night and go to the store the next day...

Now that I'm all stocked up on glue again, time to get some more layering done. Once I had enough glue it was easy peasy. I layered all 12 layers of foam and stringer and set up some weights on top to hold it down:



Let's let these guys dry and get to some shaping! See you soon.