Virus Inspired Stand Up Paddleboard

[Bmac]

OK, I love project journals, and now that I've  had to close my dental office for the unforseen future, I'd thought I'd contribute to the forum again with a build. This has been a build on my list for a while. Sort of been putting it off since it's a big build, over 11 feet long. Had to build a plywood benchtop to go over my work bench and a lot of prep work needed to get the frame correct. Hopefully when this whole thing is over I'll get a chance to enjoy this build. 

I'll be using red cedar and paulownia for this build. The frame is made from 1/4" ply. I've had the pattern printed for a while. 

Started with the frame cut out. Feet were included in the pattern to suport the skeleton until the top deck is glued on. Here's a pick of the frame without the cross pieces, all the vertical lines on the pattern are where the cross pieces will be placed;

Cross pieces cut and fitted to the spline;

This build should go pretty quickly since I'm sequestered at home and can really focus. Next steps are to cut notches into the corners of the cross members and add strips to the frame for added gluing surface. 

Thanks for looking.

 

[pkinneb]

Sorry your practice was shuddered due to the virus but I am looking forward to following along!

[wtnhighlander]

Yep, sorry it was forced on you, but thus is going to be interesting!

[Chet]

I hate to pile on but you dental lose is our gain.    Going to be watching.

[davewyo]

I'm in!

 

It is amazing how quickly SUPaddleboards have exploded onto the boating scene. It is similar to the sport of pack-rafting. In just a decade it has gone from seeing them occasionally to today where they are ubiquitous.

I have seen groups running rapids on the San Juan River, three days from civilization, with a raft for a support boat. There will be your normal inflatable raft with all the comforts of home on board, and a half dozen people on SUPs.

[Bmac]

So for the second installment of this build I've done a ton of prep work and glue ups. I'm preparing the frame for the glue up of the deck, or "skin". Things needed to be completed were first notching the corners of the cross pieces. The notch is 3/8" x3/8" and a rib will be glued into this notch. Also I'm gluing small paulownia strips to the plywood frame to help with the glue up of the ribs and the skin. Here's what those 2 steps look like;

Next I placed some blocking pieces to support the handle. Again, using paulownia;

Once those steps were done, I milled some 3/8 x 3/8 paulownia strips to use for the ribs. Glue up took 2 rounds, 1 round per side. Now things are starting to take shape;

Since this board is 11' long, I did not have stock that long, so i joined 2 strips at a place were the rib is fairly straight;

Also, some small kerf cuts were placed in the rib to help with bending. Paulownia bends very nicely and is remarkably strong. I could have made this bend with out the kerfs, but without the kerfs there was a lot of torque and pressure on the frame. The frame becomes much more stable once the ribs are glued on so the kerfs help the unstable frame maintain it's proper shape;

While the glue was drying, i started milling up my paulownia. This wood was milled from trees on my property and air dried by me. It looks pretty ugly in rough form;

But cleans up nicely;

So what's on tap today is to sand and level the frame. You can see in this pic that not everything is perfectly flush. Some sanding/rasping/ and shaping will fix this;

So once the frame and all it's pieces are flush I'll start adding the skin. I'll be using paulownia and red cedar, milled to 5/16" thick. Also, because I'm sure you may be wondering, I'm using TB III for the glue up.

Thanks for looking.

[treeslayer]

looking mighty fine, just a quick question, are the cavities going to be filled with some kind of foam?

[Bmac]

It will end up being hollow, no need to fill it. It will really get water proofed with the glassing and epoxy coat 

[wtnhighlander]

@Bmac, can a board that size be fitted with a mast & sail? The blocking you added for a handle attachment makes me think it might.  Also, is that paulownia as light-weight as I keep hearing it is?

[Bmac]

I’m not sure about a sail but I would assume it could be.

Yes, paulownia is crazy light, like balsa but much stronger. I’m carrying around 7/4, 10’ boards, 11” wide like they are nothing

[Chip Sawdust]

Too light. Throw some Aussie red gum in there or something. Hey, it's weather resistant!

Looks like a hella fun build, and just in time for summer!

[Coop]

This is looking really cool! Couple of questions. How wide/thick will the edges be? As the paulownia is 11’ long and so is your board, will you be attempting to resaw it at 11’ or cut it into more manageable pieces? I have a feeling that will be answered in the next episode? 

[Bmac]

9 hours ago, Coop said:

This is looking really cool! Couple of questions. How wide/thick will the edges be? As the paulownia is 11’ long and so is your board, will you be attempting to resaw it at 11’ or cut it into more manageable pieces? I have a feeling that will be answered in the next episode? 

Coop, I actually do not have stock that long, I do have a few boards almost long enough, about 10'. I reconfigured the position of some of the machines in my shop to clean up and resaw those boards, but in the end I wondered why I bothered, I can make this SUP just as easily with shorter boards and I'll show how I do that. 

At it's thickest point, the cross members are about 4" thick, and with the top deck and the bottom deck and it will end up being about 4.5" thick. 

One interesting point I meant to bring up is when surfacing these boards I'm not worring too much about getting my boards flat. They all are pretty flay to begin with, but I'm just running them thru the planer. You may then wonder, well that will be a problem, right? Not really. I think getting a 10' board flat is pretty hard without a super long jointer bed, and secondly since I'm resawing things to 5/16 and bending it onto the frame as I glue it, flatness is not that critical. Also, as I glue things up onto the board, I'm able to pull pieces together and glue in place. The pieces are pretty forgiving because they are so thin. 

More to follow, I hope to get the top deck finished today. 

Thanks for looking!

[Bmac]

Chugging along. My last post I outlined I needed to level the frame and ribs. Well I started doing that with some selective rasping and then made a sanding board. Simply a piece of poplar with 120 adhesive paper adde to it;

 

That did the trick fairly quickly. Next I started adding the top deck. As I told @Coop in another post, since the SUP is 11' long, I don't have stock that long. So where I need to join two pieces I did a simple butt joint with a reinforcing piece glued to the underside;

After multiple tedious glueups I could finally see some progress. Herre's one of my glue ups, looks like a clamp party;

While I was waiting for glue to dry, I glued up a panel for my fin;

And after what seemed like endless glueups here's the top deck;

Still need to clean up the sides, but I'll likely do that after the bottom deck is added;

I'll clean up the top and then flip it over and start my bottom deck glueup. Things are going well and so far so good.

Thanks for looking!

[wtnhighlander]

Sweet!  Do the sides get a similar thickness of decking, or do you make them beefier for durability?

[Bmac]

I’ll be using pieces with the similar thickness as the decks. You can do a solid rail where you laminate multiple strips, or you can do a “hollow” rail where the strips are “stepped”. I’ll likely do a hollow rail as this won’t be a board used in the surf And a hollow rail makes the board lighter. The glassing adds a lot of strength to the board, something that is hard to appreciate until you actually glass something. 

[Coop]

In your 3rd and 4th pic in this series, it looks like you did a great job resawing and thicknessing the boards! In your clamp party pic, can we assume the sequence to be, glue the first piece to the frame, held down by the vertical clamps, then edge joint the second piece and glue it to the frame, let that dry, remove all clamps and repeat? 

[pkinneb]

54 minutes ago, Coop said:

In your 3rd and 4th pic in this series, it looks like you did a great job resawing and thicknessing the boards! In your clamp party pic, can we assume the sequence to be, glue the first piece to the frame, held down by the vertical clamps, then edge joint the second piece and glue it to the frame, let that dry, remove all clamps and repeat? 

Coop I had to he same question

[Bmac]

7 hours ago, Coop said:

In your 3rd and 4th pic in this series, it looks like you did a great job resawing and thicknessing the boards! In your clamp party pic, can we assume the sequence to be, glue the first piece to the frame, held down by the vertical clamps, then edge joint the second piece and glue it to the frame, let that dry, remove all clamps and repeat? 

 

6 hours ago, pkinneb said:

Coop I had to he same question

Hope this answers your questions, I'm applying clamping pressure down to the frame with the vertical clamps. I was clamping at each rib. This might be excessive and thru my research I've seen guys use heavy bricks and etc to hold the boards down. It will be harder to clamp down the bottom deck because the top deck will prevent me from getting the clamp around the rib. If that doesn't make sense now I hope it will shortly when I start clamping the bottom deck. 

The horizontal clamps are used to just keep a little sideways pressure on the board to close up the joint. I actually don't need to use the sideways clamping pressure every glue up. The thin cedar piece was easy enough to push it against the adjacent board and the clamp down vertically to hold it in place. I'm really just trying to get a little glue squeeze out one the edge joints.

As for the sequence, I started with the middle decking board, centered over the vertical rib, or "stringer". Then alternate gluing the boards to eack side of the center board and so on. So you can see it's tedious, you need a lot of clamps, it makes you shop look like an unorganized mess, and you go through a lot of glue.

Did that answer your questions?

[davewyo]

It's coming right along.

 

Are you following a plan of some sort?

[Bmac]

2 hours ago, davewyo said:

It's coming right along.

 

Are you following a plan of some sort?

Yes, I purchased a plan from WoodSurfboardPlans.com. They send you a link to print out the patterns and the instructions. I've made other surf boards from this site, so I've learned a lot through that process. This build is much easier because of those other builds.

Here are the pics of the other boards I did;

Long Board;

Short Fish with deep swallow tail;

 

[Chestnut]

Bah! i want to make all of these. Is 32 too young to retire?

Bah your builds are so epic i love this so much. A SUP would get used a lot at our lake place.

[Bmac]

4 hours ago, Chestnut said:

Bah! i want to make all of these. Is 32 too young to retire?

Bah your builds are so epic i love this so much. A SUP would get used a lot at our lake place.

Of course you can retire at 32, your $ for your habit may dry up though and you may lose your girl. Now if you can afford to retire at 32, you definitely did something right.

Now that you have your mill, you need to get your hands on a paulownia tree.

[Tom King]

Looking good!  SUP's are big here.

To answer the sailing questions, it would sail just fine, but without a daggerboard, or centerboard (A daggerboard you poke down through a slot.  A centerboard pivots), you would have a hard time going upwind. Not being able to get upwind would make it hard to get back to where you came from. 

 Back in the original Windsurfer days, when Pam and I were Master Instructors (we taught instructors how to teach), you had to pull the daggerboard out, and hang it on your arm, when going downwind in heavy air.  If you didn't pull it out, the board would roll over as the daggerboard lifted to the surface from high speed.

  It would definitely be a light air board though.   We still have lots of sailboard equipment left over from the '80's, and a little newer stuff.

I didn't retire at 32, but we've played hard since before then.

[Chestnut]

4 hours ago, Bmac said:

Now that you have your mill, you need to get your hands on a paulownia tree.

I think where your at is the closest they grow to me. Set one aside for me and i'll come get it. It should be light enough for carry on no?