I am a first time shaper trying to shape a performance egg that does good on rail to rail turns and gathers momentum on slightly mushy 1-5 foot southern california waves that happen here year round. I have already cut out the template from this Online Download https://www.blendingcurves.com/outline-templates/egg-b. I am having a little trouble on figuring out what I should do on the foil and rail profile. I am thinking a 2 1/2" thickness in the middle but not sure what thickness to apply on the nose and the tail. I am also thinking for the rail profile a 60/40 pinched nose but i dont know if that would create enough suction to performance value that I am looking for. Any advice would be greatly appreciated in creating rail bands, rocker, and foiling in creating smooth flow in all of these aspects of shaping. Thanks.
Are you saying you have already cut the blank? If so, what blank did you use? If this is your first time out and you’ve already cut a blank then your options are already more limited than if you had planned everything out in advance.
I actually haven’t bought the blank yet. That’s good to know. I guess another question to ask is what type of blank I should get and if I should cut it out to the masonite template that i already have or cut it out bigger so that i have room to play with.
Did you say that you have done this before? Maybe I missed something. OK, my bad. I see you haven’t. Better hit up YouTube before you go any farther. The room to play with comment is troubling.
If the Blending Curves shape is the shape you want, then trace the paper cut-out onto your masonite and be accurate about it. I’m just finishing my first board now, which was a lovely learning curve (pun intended), and I’d probably spend more time being a little more accurate with the template and the plan trace.
Don’t cut your template until you know you can source a blank for it. I had my heart set on making a 7’10, but he’d sold out of the 8’ blank I wanted, so I got a 7’7 and copied a shape to fit. My supplier had about 40 different blanks, so there was room to wriggle when Plan A didn’t happen. Go have a look at a supply warehouse if you can - you’ll see that the blanks make decisions for you with rocker and nose/tail thickness.
Plenty of great videos around of people drawing up templates, cutting their blank, cleaning it up etc. Have a look around for a bit and that should demystify the process.
No blank yet? Good. That means you’re options are wide open.
Ideally, if you’re doing a board for yourself you want to plan everything out in advance before you even get a blank.
- figure out where you are in your surfing and what you’re trying to do with THIS board. Your stature, your skill level, the break and conditions you’re aiming the board at, how you want to surf it, etc.
- figure out what kind of design you think will fit that combination. How much length and width, how much float, what fin setup you want to do, how much or little rocker - all that.
- Once you have an idea of how much rocker, width and thinkness you need you can look for a blank that will fit your design. The think to remember about blanks is that as a beginning shaper you can always add a little rocker curve and both ends but you basically can’t flatten an existing rocker, so better for your blank to be a little too flat in the rocker than a little too curvy.
- Don’t be afraid of making your own template using a batten over masonite. It’s not that hard to do. Or, if you do use someone else’s template (like Blending Curves) don’t be afraid of resizing it a little to suit. Maybe you want to change the tail shape or add some width to whatnot. The whole point of doing your own is to do your own so that you get what you want instead of what’s available on the rack at your local SurfMart Superstore.
For your first board, I wouldn’t even thin the max thickness of the blank out by more than it takes to skin it and fair everything out cleanly.
- Forget trying to emulate the speed and fluency that you see in the shaping videos. Those guys have thousands of boards under their belt so what they’re doing is beyond what you’ll be able to do at this point. As a noob shaper you will not be shaping a board in an hour, and that’s completely okay. Betting to move more slowly until you develop your eye and your control over your tools. You can always continue to take a little more off but you can never put any of it back on. You’re sculpting, not building.
So since you’re in the pre-blank stage, tell us about your stature and surfing skill level because you already mentioned the conditions you’re aiming the board at and you’ve already picked out a hybrid-type template. .
thanks so much for that, very in depth and clear. So I am 5’9 and 130 pounds. My level is intermediate so I know how to do bottom turns and cutbacks on shortboards. What I want to be able to do is start getting better and high perfomance on this egg. I want to be able to do good turns that arent too drawn out, that you get with a longboard. Another question I have is what your steps are when shaping? What aspect of shaping do you start out with and what order do you go in with shaping the different sections of the board? Again, thanks so much for the advice.
If you’re a novice or intermediate longboarder who’s coming down in length your needs are different than if you were an experienced shortboarder looking for a small wave board to cruise. At 130# you don’t have the size to muscle a wide tail the way you would if you weighed 200#+. Also, you don’t need a lot of thickness.
Due to your stature, I’m going to suggest that maybe the Egg-B template may be a little wide in the tail for you, and maybe switching over to a slightly more agressive template might be the thing, like their Retro-C which has a 14.5" tail and the wide point forward. They’re saying it’s a singlefin design but a 2+1 or quad would work fine as well.
The one thing I would caution against is trying to do a thruster at this stage of your progression; those require more skill and more active pumping than a 2+1 or quad, and you have to be able of getting your reaf foot over that rear fin, which most novices and even intermediate surfers cannot do. And as a lighter rider, if you do want to try a quad then plan to set your rear fins inboard of the rail line a little and use the asymmetric rear foils in the rear fins (like a 70/30), as opposed to the single foiled fins at the rail.
With a quad or 2+1, you want a rocker that’s relatively low in the tail, like 2"; not the higher tail rockers than the thrusters use. Given your stature you don’t need a lot of float, so all of this actually points maybe using a “performance board” blank rather than a beefier egg blank that the larger surfers would use. A US Blanks 6-8RP would definitely do it, maybe order it with slightly shorter rockers to flatten it out a little. I’m not sure a Retro C would fit a 6-8P (performance board blank) due to where the wide point in the template would hit the blank, but if it did then that might be a better blank.
Or you could try some of the other blank manufacturers. If you want to stick with your original plan, a 6-8RP would fit your EggB template, too. You just want to order the blank with less rocker at both ends due to the widths involved.
Wow, thank you so much. I didn’t even consider that about the type of blank when I order it. Thank you so much for the advice and I hope I can apply that knowledge to my first time!
The whole point of doing your own is to do your own. So while I’m offering up some suggestions for your consideration, other posters will surely have different suggestions. In the end, it’s your project, your priorities and your call. We’ll support you regardless of which way you decide to go. Let us know what you want to do and we’ll try to help you get there.
The key here is to take your time. If you need to order a custom rocker that’ll take a week to get back, but when compared to using the wrong rocker for what you’re trying to do it’s definitely worth the wait. Let us know which way you want to go and we’ll suggest a blank+rocker combo.