A week in the wood shed with Mike.

Mike and I have been looking at a better way to build our boards which is not unusual for those of you that have already built a board or two. You will know that your head is filled with ideas. So there is only one thing to do and that is to get to it and put the theory into practice. Well we have and last week we started building the boards. First of all we wanted to be able to CNC the frames to get the accuracy in what we are trying to achieve. Mike machined all the Paulownia panels to be routed and above you will see the result. Probably the biggest single step forward is cutting the frames accurately so that they just fit together.

Here is my 5ft 10" fish all popped out of the sheet and spliced together as planned.

Just pull the nose in to hold the rail line with some soft wire.

The same with my 10ft "Alley Slider" old school log . No glue yet. The curved stringer each side of the central stringer preload the whole frame so as to hold everything in place.

The frames have knobs on the ends that fit neatly out flush with the edge of the rail bands and this helps hold it all together.

The frame is placed on a solid straight edge to line everything up , although it is pretty straight given the number of contact points in the frame design. Still no glue holding anything together yet.
It is a great feeling to see this all come together and that our ideas do work and it can be done. The saving in cutting and assembly time with this amount of accuracy is amazing and just makes it so much easier to get what we are after in the finished board.