15 . 02 . 13
This past week has been a busy one in the workshop here at Otter surfboards, and it’s been absolutely brilliant. We’ve been running another one of our “Build-Your-Own” workshop weeks and this time it was the turn of Allan and Myles to get busy with clamps, block planes and glass paper turning a stack of raw materials into two finished surfboards over the course of five days.
Myles is building himself a 6’4″ Woodburner fish, with a central sandwich of walnut and poplar. He lives just down the road and plans on taking his board out at Sennen cove when it’s back from the laminators, just in time for Spring.
Allan has come over from his home in Sweden to attend the workshop week. He’s taken on the challenge of building himself a stand-up paddle board to surf back home and also for trips to his native Denmark. Allan lives on the West coast of Sweden, not far from Gothenburg, and already has stand-up paddle boards for flat water racing, but wanted something a little more suitable for taking out in the surf. Because of the short distance between the West coast of Sweden and the East coast of Denmark, all of the surf at Allan’s local beach is fairly short period wind swell, so he wanted a board that was a little heavier in order to cut through any bump in the waves and which wouldn’t itself get blown around.
He’s also planning on taking his board on trips across to Denmark to the region around Klitmøller to get it into some North Sea swells. Because of the extra rail thickness and length of Allan’s SUP, he’s been really active this week running up and down the length of his board gluing on rail strips and then shaping them down. It’s amazing how much extra work an extra few feet of rail length, or added thickness in the rails, adds up to! Myles on the other hand has used the extra time that his shorter board is allowing him to keep his work nice and tidy as he goes, sanding and removing excess glue from the rails before preparing the board for the deck to go on.
If you’re interested in joining us for a week to build your own wooden surfboard then click through to the Workshops page on our website, or hit the link from the bottom of each individual surfboard’s page. All of our surfboards are able to be built in a workshop, and you really don’t need any great experience with woodworking or tools to be able to do a great job and leave with a top quality surfboard. If you know which end of a saw to hold on to, then you qualify! Workshops run throughout the year, so click through the website to check availability.
We walked along the beach at low tide to find some fun waves!
Robby and Alfie recently spent the week with us making wooden surfboards, here they are to tell you all about it...
