eke ngaru surfboards

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.