18 . 05 . 14
Back in March we were joined by Lloyd on one of our “Build-Your-Own” workshop weeks. Lloyd is a joiner by trade and so had a bit of a head start over his fellow board-builders as he was already confident with a lot of the tools that we use to build and shape our surfboards. He realised fairly early on that he would have a bit of extra time each day and decided to use this time to add a few extra details to his surfboard.
Where we normally fit a single-piece nose and tail block to workshop boards, Lloyd laminated up blocks in the same timber configuration as his deck and bottom skins, using offcuts from the preparation of his surfboard. When assembled the pattern of poplar and walnut in his central accent strip would wrap around the entire length of his surfboard, top and bottom in a continuous stripe. This took a lot of careful measuring and accurate cutting to ensure that all of the individual strips in the laminate would match up, as just a couple of millimetres mis-alignement when gluing down the deck skin would have been instantly visible. Thankfully Lloyd paid great attention to detail, was incredibly patient, and consequently the results looks brilliant.
He had also asked about the possibility of having custom, wooden, glass-on fins to match his board. James had prepared the timber prior to the start of the workshop week and Lloyd then laid up a blank and cut-out the twin fins for his (slightly stretched) 6′ 5.5″ Woodburner fish, ready to be foiled and laminated by Paul and Bro at Diplock Phoenix Finishing.
Lloyd’s surfboard arrived back at the workshop last week and he picked it up from us just yesterday. Later on in the evening an e-mail landed in the Otter Surfboards inbox – Lloyd had made the most of the swell and long evenings that we’re enjoying at the moment and had taken his board straight to the beach.
“I had a great surf tonight, it took a bit of getting used to riding a short board again but once I had a few under my belt the board just took off! So fast and loose – it was awesome. I’m a very happy human!”
We thought that his new board looked incredible. Lloyd did a great job enhancing the finer points of his Woodburner and, being that he lives just a few miles up the road, we’re looking forward to seeing more of him and his latest creation out in the line-up.
Things did not go quite as planned this morning, but we stumbled across a little barrel on the sand, all to ourselves!
Adam popped by recently to collect the 7'2 Coaster wooden surfboard he made with us back in August...
