This is gonna be a long project but I’ve made a bit of headway so I figured I’d post it as some may be interested, maybe not… who knows! Haha.
The ultimate goal is to build a functional hotcurl out of a large chunk of Cedar that I got from Bill.
I had never even seen a hotcurl in person before this and the journey thus far has been awesome. I am overwhelmed and in awe with the amount of support and encouragement I’ve got on this build from people taking their time to share with me about the design, to opening up museums, to letting me actually ride one before building this thing.
I am building one first out of foam to ride and get a better feeling for the design and how I need to dial it in for the real project - the hotcurl out of cedar.
Awesome project! Looks good, nice that you were able to do your homework on the hotcurl.
I hope to build one someday! I’m sure I’ll have a ton of questions then.
I’ll start off with, what blank did you end up using - is that a special order blank?
I’m going to re-size the pics down to a reasonable size so that they don’t post sideways. Its an unfortunate glitch (that I hope gets corrected eventually) that the site allows pics to be posted in the MB range, when the software really wants them down in the KBs.
Realize I totally didn’t answer your question haha
It’s an 113d with a custom rocker - these boards are pretty flat. I took over half and inch of rocker out of the center still and ended up pretty close to the numbers I was shooting for. - next time I’ll use the BG version - probably about an inch of foam to remove on the thickness but it would run a little better flow into the tail section to reduce rocker and keep it thick. - they look fairly straight forward. It they got quite a bit going on to get one out of a foam blank.
Looks great. It appears to have a fair amount of flat up forward. I don’t recall seeing other hot curls with that kind of bottom contour. Did you copy the shape from an existing old board? Just curious about the flatness.
Deck it almost completely flat (3/4 rocker) - bottom is relatively close to that as well.
Josh Martin gave me a lot of help with the design. He is the only guy I know of that consistently makes them and has been down the rabbit hole with the design. Also unclegrumpy opened up shop for me to look and feel some of the original wood boards which was awesome. Gave me a good understanding of how to do the next one.
The center (bottom contour) is almost dead flat. - flat is fast - belly works as well but it’s slower. The guys who I spoke with that own Josh’s boards said you want fast.
This one is really just a warm up so to speak to work out some kinks and really get a feel for the ride and design before I make the real project.
I did get my first surf on it yesterday morning and I am really pleased with it. It’ll probably take me 2-3 months to really get a good grasp on how to ride it properly and understand the nuances of how to control it.
The ultimate goal surf wise is to get it out in some bigger waves and the kelp infested coves we got here.
That is some absolutely beautiful work. Really well done. There are some very nice boards being made here lately… Onya.
ps. Did I miss the outcome of the chambered Pier board?
This pic is why I asked my question. Having only seen photos of hot curls and never seen one ‘in the flesh’, I was not aware that they had so much flat in the hull.
Knowing that they were originally just an older design that was modded/cut down by John Kelly with the help of Froiseth and Heath, it makes sense that they retained some flat of the original board. The intent was to narrow the tail and add V to keep from “sliding ass” so the rails were apparently blended into the tail without changing more than necessary.
