the frozen fish and the snow glider

hey all!

i hope you had nice holidays and santa claus was a good guy to all of you.

i was very busy in the garden shed, sanding and mowing some fresh foam.
it was a bit cold in there at -5 degrees celsius, maybe i should have bought a heater or something but theres no place left in the shed. so a lot of clothes and a lot of sanding kept me quite warm.

on the way to the shed it looked like this:







i attacked my first "real" PU blank some time ago and totally f**ked it up with the planer while skinning the bottom, it looked like a battlefield and i was quite frustrated. got back the next day and smoothed it all out a bit with the surform and sanding block and really kinda got it even again. it was a 7`9H US blank that was meant to become my personal 7`3 Glider but it was way too thin when everything was more or less even again. so i decided to declare it as a practice blank and try everything with it that will cross my way in the near future. i tried to shape a swallowtail, got used to planing the stringer down with the different handplanes and so on.

then i took the 6`2A fish blank to get started with my first keel fish.

5`8 x 20 3/4 x 2 3/4




















it went quite well, besides that i must have messed up measuring a bit when drawing the outline on the blank. when i pulled out my swallow tail template and lined it up to draw it on, it just didnt really fit. so i measured the tail again and noticed that it was like 3/4" narrower on the left side. hmm, great! i had the rails rough shaped already at that time so i wasnt quite sure what to do next.
i took measurements every foot or so and made dots to get symmetry again. well sort of..
then i took the planer and cut into my almost finished kinda good looking rail. that was tough.

i shaped the rail again and it came out ok i guess. ALWAYS MEASURE TWICE!

when i was almost finished sanding, the blank fell off the racks which left a gaping crack in the right tail rail. i was like "ok, can somebody hit me now that i wake up? this must be a dream." i was really bummed.



i got a heat gun and tried to get it fixed. with a heat gun, when you have dents in the foam, you can get those out most of the time because the foam reacts to heat like a cake in the oven, it extends.



it did in my case but still left me with a little crack.
i tried to sand the area flat again and blend it into the existing railshape, but i sanded too much and ended up with some kind of a swallow bump tail on the right side. hmm its not really symmetric but who cares really.
its my first board and im really happy with how it turned out. it could have turned out better tough without all of these mistakes and unlucky happenings, but this is just learning and and i will take extra care the next time.

the fishie will get 101fin co. bamboo keels from mr. marlin bacon for the lokbox system. hmm yummie!
have a look at my links section for infos

ok thats it for now.
hope you enjoyed!

take care, trimchris