I am really trying to take my time with the templates now. I am now willing to get rid of them if I dont like them before even touching foam.
Can you just look at this one and tell me what you would do? I am trying to make a 6’4 quad fin fish for myself. I made the template in AKU shaper and exported to board cad. This is the first template I made on masonite using grid paper. It worked quite well.
I was playing around on the blank last night and something about the nose on this one seems off. Is the issue that I didn’t leave enough fullness in the nose?
Would you all just make a new template? Or is there some way to just increase nose fullness using my existing template?
Masonite is cheap, as are a number of other template alternatives.
As well, yeah, you used such and such a software. Neat.
But your eye is telling you that’s not what you want. Excellent. Educate your eye and trust it.
Now, try something old-school: Lofting. From my old trade; boat bulding. I’d describe it, but here’s a good introduction. Easier than rewriting the chapter of Chapelle’s Boatbuilding that describes it. The nice thing about a lofted curve is you can see it when the batten goes down and if it doesn’t look right, futz with it. Then,draw your line.
With a pencil. A sharp pencil. Throw the fuc#ing sharpie away, far away. It’s a crude tool at best. I like a very soft lead, like a #1, it makes a good visible mark without denting what you’re going to work with. And if you need to, (oops, drew that wrong) it cleans off easy.
This is how ships were designed for centuries, how a lot of the original surfboard templates were made, how, among other things, the Supermarine Spifire was laid out. It produces a smooth, fair, hydrodynamic curve.
I saw fiberglass hawaii do this with a batten made of masonite. Is there any way you can buy a batten? I don’t have any good saws so this is the reason that I have been trying to find another way to do it.
For my first two templates I used a dowel, but with a long dowel the curve wasn’t smooth. I think in an ideal world a nice square batten would work really well because you could bascally just create your curve with a couple finishing nails into the masonite and not worry about the stupid paper template. However, I think that the pointy nose was an issue with my cad shaping not the template itself per say.
Lots of different ways to hopefully get a good result. I will re-do this tomorrow and get back to you with an updated shape. I want it to be fuller in the nose and less pulled in in the tail.
I’ve seen battens made of a lot of things, but yeah, you can indeed buy them. My late father was fond of white pine lattice stock, about 1/4 x 1 1/4 very clear white pine, though he and later I would go through whatever stock the lumberyard had and pick the two or three best. We’d flex them and look very close at the grain/
Now, those were great for making up big boat planks and such. We’d sometimes set them on edge ( up against finish nails, 6d or so) to get sharper curves if we had to.
But there’s a lot of trim profiles, see what your friendly neighborhood lumberyard has. Or, if you know a finish carpenter, get him a sixpack and tell him what you want, we all have a loft full of such sticks.
Dowels, yeah, the grain on those things is kinda sketchy, it would definitely bend funny. It speaks well of you that you spotted that.Good.
I think you’re on the right path. Rather than going to the CAD setup for your shape, do your shape and then feed the numbers back into the computer…if you want a lot of frankly silly details like volume that really don’t matter as much as a lot of people will tell ya.As well, it’s real nice and all if you have numbers you could feed into a CAM setup and rough shape a piece of foam and then another and then another, all the same, but you’re not.
You’re on the right track but the curve in the nose looks flat. You’re working toward a needle nose. Try dragging the control point for the tip straight down by maybe 1/2" or 1" - that will put more curve in. Try multiple iterations until that curve looks right to you.
Also, take advantage of the 3-D rendering function in Aku or Boardcad. Rotate the board around and look at the whole thing from different angles. Look at pics of different boards from different shapers to see the lines they’re drawing. The primary advantage with the CAD programs is the ability to make unlimited adjustments in your design until you get exactly what you want.
Another way I sometimes use to look at the curve is to flip the board upside down.
In a word, yes. Use Masonite, and make a full length HALF TEMPLATE, and use it to draw BOTH sides. In this way, you are assured that the curves on the left side, and right side are identical. At present, the two sides of your planshape, are not identical.
Adam-- Depends on your location. If you are anywhere near an area where there has been any Sailboarding you should be able to find one. They are used to reinforce Sails. Made of fiberglass and can be anything from very flexible to stiff. You can find metal straight edges in stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s. There is a section usually in the hardware dept where they sell 8’ straight edge metal. Cheap flexible yard sticks are also usable. Worse comes to worse; 1/4" or 1/8" inch wood strips are workable. I can make adjustments to any template with a batten.
I’ve used bicycle safety flag masts and also fishing rod blanks to connect the dots on wrapping paper. Once it’s looking decent on paper, it’s pretty easy to cut a bit outside the line and trace on to masonite. Once you have a rough cut out the finalization of the curve takes place using razor planes, surforms and sanding blocks. Take a lot of time to get this right as it is your outline pattern. As Doc says, trace it on to your blank with a pencil and stick to the line top and bottom. You do want a squared edge after you cut and true your blank. This is an important step… one of many.
That nose looks terrible. Where your pencil line starts veering away from the blank, rest your pinky on the outside of the rail. Hold your pencil on the line and follow up to the nose on both rails. Keep the distance between the pinky and pencil the same throughout. Adjust that template for a shorter board.
Haha Thanks for verifying what I thought. I ended up just rejigging the template in AKU and was able to make a much better template with a normal nose, a wider tail and less of a curve in the center. It came out great!
