Monk-EH: beginning of a Longboard and paper models

So last weekend there was a festival in Delft called 'Gemaakt' ('Made' in English). It was a festival with all kinds of awesome projects shown to the public. Aurora also participated with her Rewind Memetics project, But I'll get to that some other time. Another cool thing there was Durkes, these guys make longboards out of bamboo and glassfibers.

After riding a bit on them and asking them all sorts of questions I decided I wanted to make my own longboard! It would get me working with wood again, let me bend wood! Make me use Epoxy again, and also just lets me experiment with something new again. So all in all a perfect summer project :).

I found this website made by toothless that describes a very basic way of making a longboard with plywood and epoxy, nothing else! So I wanted to make one like this.

First I bought me some Wood. Birch plywood of the best quality. And cut it in two:

After deciding which is going to be the top and which the bottom I started to make the markings on the bottom one:

Then on one half of the board I put paper to draw the shape on. Aurora helped me with some other papers to let me get the perfect shape:

Then I had to cut away the excess paper, in order for me draw the line on the wood:

And then I drew the shape on the wood, flipped the paper and also drew the shape on the other side of the board:

Later I added marks where I would drill. The holes that are going to be made here will make it easier to screw both sides of plywood to each other when applying epoxy:

And I drilled the holes into them:

close up :) :

Later I went to my parents place (because of powertools) And put the epoxy on both plywood boards and put them on top of each other. Added weight to make a curve and put the screws in, to get rid of all the excess epoxy:

And a shot of the soon to be curve :) :

So, this afternoon I will start to start to saw the shape of the board out and sand the whole thing.

I already found out some things that I'll do differently when building another board: First of all make sure that the whole floor is covered with paper, I did most of the floor but didn't do the exactly every part of the floor so now we have an epoxy floor.

Another thing that I learned from a friend just now is that I should have used film because Epoxy doesn't attach to that, I didn't use it and now there is a high probability that my board is glued to the steps on which it's leaning. Which would suck.

Put the screws in first, in only the first board, and then put epoxy on and put the two boards together. Most of my time was spent hurrying to put all the screws in the wholes and then screwing them in. If they were already partly in it would have gone so much faster.

Lastly the use of glue clamps would have helped a lot. Putting the screws in didn't go perfectly as they sometimes pushed the lower board a little away creating a gap between the two boards which I didn't want. Having had clamps would probably reduced this.

Any way I also would show some pictures of some paper models that I made!

So first of all the lucky pig that I gave my mother for mothers day, it was inspired by a tutorial of computerarts.co.uk: