Takashi Watanabe's retro fish

Japanese wooden board builder Takashi Watanabe has just finished his 6ft 3" x 22" x 2 5/8" fish.The beautiful wood he has used is hand picked for its grain , it is famous Japanese Akita Cedar.The rails are laminated Paulownia and cork and the fins are homemade from 9 layers of Lauan plywood 6.9mm thick.



You can see here in the tail the deck has been glued on after the rail built out.


Great looking timber and colour.


He has built the frame as normal and then laminated the rails to the frame prior to then adding the deck and bottom skins.This gives you greater access to clamp the rail build up on. You just have to fair the rail bands out from the ends of the frames before gluing the deck and bottom on.

Also he has cut this insert in the nose to give him a nice curve to the outline in the nose. It is very easy to loose the nice outline flow in the nose of the board as the thin railband comes to a point.It also give you more surface area to glue to in this limited area. I have also used surfboard foam in the area as well , which is easy to shape and gives a great glue surface as well.


A nice way to keep that flow I was talking about in the nose.You only need to build out a few layers and you gain a lot of strength here.

Check out Takashi's blog at : http://wavers.blog27.fc2.com