I've Made My First Garage Board (Solo)!

Good grief, so it's come to this! I've copied as closely as possible my 5'4 Tyler Warren (Hobie) "Bar of Soap". Really pleased with the shape, I've managed to get closer than I thought I would with the rocker, foil and rails. There's a slight difference in the nose rocker and I've got a little more volume in mine as I've left a bit more foam by having a flatter, less convex, deck.

My main problem was that I didn't mix enough resin for the first lamination (the bottom). I know it's the first rule "mix more than enough" but I got a bit muddled about quantities - largely because of all this talk of "quarts" on Swaylocks and stuff. Stupid quarts. I only mixed 800mls. I'm on my second board now and I mixed double that!

I hand foiled the fins from marine ply, glassed them on (should've doubled up the rovings because I don't think they were quite thick enough). Made a leash loop because since I wasn't drilling fin plugs I thought it would be nice to not drill anything into the board at all. Also, I simply wanted to try as many techniques as possible to learn as much as I could.



Here's a Flickr gallery with more photographs of the process and showing a comparison of my board to the original "Soap":