just thought i'd add about the timber i'm using. paulownia is about the best, light - almost as light as balsa, waterproof, very strong by weight. but expensive and hard to find. i found a stand of old japanese cedar (cryptomeria japonica) growing on the farm which where planted in the early days of exotic timber trees trialed around new zealand. its very light, quite durable and waterproof. hey they've been making buildings out of it in japan for a few thousand years. best of all it was free. $450 got it all slabbed up (2 trees) and i then mill it in a mates joinery factory, not as easy to work as paulownia, but i do like the grain, this board is sheathed in flat sawn boards and the next one is using quarter sawn. it will be interesting to see the difference

then decided to get a bit more educated about this surfboard building/designing/shaping.
someone told me to contact a guy in aussie who made timber boards - was a pretty big fella as well - and is approachable. what more could i ask for.... sent off an email comes back he's from the same small northland town as me, although a few years different in our ages. learnt to surf as a kid with my uncle, and knows most of the same people as myself (dargaville ain't a big place) Grant Newby is his name and i've been dredging and pleading  him for info ever sense. lucky he's a good bugger!
grant uses mainly an EPS foam core and vacuum forms 4-6mm paulownia timber skins onto his boards, using polyurethane glue (like gorilla glue) builds out a rail, shapes,sands and coats the boards in lanolin (sheeps wool oil) which seals and protects the boards, but also has the added advantage of going sticky in salt water - no wax! sounds simple ......
now onto my first "grant board," another longboard and i have to admit its been a learning curve but a fun build

grant has given me one of his files for this board, designed on aku shaper, then a dfx file has to be made. which is the file that the polystyrene guys use to hot wire the blank, its also the tricky bit as aku is a BRD file. it then has to have a change of measurements (rails etc deleted) and be changed to a DFX file for the hotwire machine. i as yet have not found a techie mate or any other way to change brd-dfx - workin on it.....
board then has the stringer glued in, parabolic stringer around the outside. ready for the akushaper !

very cool bit of kit - thanks to glen at primal for doing it for me

board cut to finished shape, time to add skins and railbands
don't know why but i didn't take any pics of the board in the bag - next time. amazing process. tiny little vac pump but the force over the entire bag is incredible.

 now to add rail bands - four 5mm bands per side to give enough meat to shape the rail profile

shape it up and its done. i decided to epoxy this board

next  -  finbox.....

quiver

glassing - what a major, did it to cold, to thick orange peel - split. this board has more epoxy on it than timber thickness. but i got there, decided to twinzer it, don't know why really, most simmons style are twins - thought I'd turbocharge it - yeah right!

decided to build another - bigger - yep fat old bastard. more float necessary!
got onto the aku shaper thing and played around with some of the simmons style boards - mine not quite a mini simmons .... more of a midi simmons.
again a hollow board, and again pillaging chads timeless surfboards triangle rail method.
paulownia and japanese cedar this time

anyway boards - looked on the web - found a heap. decided on a 9' timeless surfboards set of plans that i could buy and download off the web...  rocker tables - clamps clamps and more clamps. but it came out pretty cool - hooked

and i just love this shot - taking the big foamies back to the boys at the ahipara surf school

thought I'd better start logging down some of my projects and pics so friends etc can have a look at what I'm doing - you tell mates your making wooden surfboards and even the ones that aren't surfers show a lot of interest.
 first pics should probably show why i started being interested in the wooden boards - the kids
they'd been hassling me for awhile to take them out. so off to ahipara we went - quite a buzz for dad watching them......