The Rails are Officially Shaped in!

Everything that I have read on building a surfboard says that shaping the rails is one of the hardest parts. So I decided to go with one of the simplest types of rails; a 50/50 rail. This just means that they are an even half circle all the way around the board. They are some of the more traditional style of rails and are supposed to be the easiest to shape. I think mine came out pretty decent.

To shape these I measured the thickness of the board and went around the entire thing making a dot at the half way point. I connected all of these dots with a straight line:



After marking all the way around I wanted to taper the Nose and the Tail a little bit. So I drew on a simple arch and shaved off some foam:



I liked the way that this looked. I didn't take off a whole lot. But I figured since my rocker isn't very much, that this would help a little bit.

Now, all that was left to do was tackled the rails. So I just broke out the Surform again and started scraping. I just went all around the bottom first. Making sure to keep and even distance from my middle line and make sure that I kept the rail round and smooth. I flipped it over and did the Deck. I made sure to leave the line still. Once I was happy with the rough shaping, I went with the 60 grit sand paper. I used my small sanding block and just started smoothing everything out and blending the curve into the Deck. I flipped the board over and did the same thing on the bottom.



Grabbing the rails for the first time was a pretty fantastic feeling. I definetly got a smile on my face when I did. It lets you know that what you've been doing is actually turning all this foam and glue and wood into a surfboard. I can't wait to get this bad boy in the water!

Now that the board is more or less completely shaped, I wanted to go back and do some more work to my stringer. So I took the planer out and started shaving it down a little bit at a time. Here's where I had one of my next issues. The Cedar wood that I bought wasn't the greatest. So I ended up having 3 small knots right on the edge of the Stringer. This makes it pretty hard to use the planer to smooth it out. I just had to work it over pretty good with that sand paper. Next time I will be a lot more selective on the wood.

That's about it for now. I'll probably do a little more fine tuning and smoothing out the foam. I also need to shave down the nose and tail end of the stringer. Where I shaved down the foam for the rails is still square. I wish I had my Dremel. It would make that a piece of cake. But I'll just have to do it by hand. Aside from that, I'm just waiting on my resin and fiberglass to get here.