Hello Doug,

I'm glad I was of influence. Whether good or bad remains to be seen! I have considered the SOF SUP, and in fact even thought about making a folding one to carry on my trips, but there are some problems with the idea. A surfboard needs to be flat on the bottom so it will plane. Any little bump will make a big difference in the surfability of it. Also the SUP's are only 3" thick, so making it with traditional SOF construction would also be hard. Making it with the Yost method would probably work, but it would probably not perform ideally. My fear is once you put the decking on so you could stand on it you probably wouldn't have saved much weight over just building a beautiful wood one.

That said, if you did do a SOF surfboard you would have the advantage of not having to put a cockpit, so you can have a stringer right down the middle just like with a hollow wood board. I would run three stringers- one right down the middle, and two splitting the width of each side. Then I would have 1/4" ribs every foot, and notch them to receive stringers along the bottom and top. The deck would need deck boards to stand on. You would have to put a lot of stringers on the bottom to maintain the flatness which is imperative even if you're lake paddling. The board needs to plane. Once you do all that you're going to have about the same work and probably similar weight as if you just built a wood one!!! My board went together in a few weeks working nights and weekends, and as you saw on my link, I had to ferry my car over to St. John with the lumber on the roof in order to borrow a saw to rip the strips, so my build time was lengthened by not having a shop. The frame kit from woodsurfboardsupply.com went together in 4 hours, documented start to finish. That included cutting the little wood blocks by hand to support the frame on the building table. It did not include the time to make the building table, but did include setting it up, finding all my tools, unpacking the frame kit, drilling vent holes in the frames (not nescessary but my choice), leveling all the frames, gluing them, etc. 4 hours! I started at 8 PM and finished at midnight! I even heated up some chicken and dumplings and ate it during that 4 hours. (in the same pot I later used to steam the mahogany!!!)

The deck is fairly easy to strip. There's minimal curvature. The bottom can be stripped in just a few hours because it's perfectly flat side-to-side. It only curves a little front-to-back. The hardest part for me was the rails because I used 1/4" mahogany and balsa. The balsa wasn't too hard although I found that it doesn't hold a curve when steam bent. It makes up for that in that it's easy to bend anyway so you really don't have to steam much curve into it. Any difference you can just bend it by hand as you glue it. I just bent a curve at the end where it needs to curve a lot more. The mahogany held a curve well, but when gluing up it was a pain because it's so springy it was hard to keep it in place. I steam bent it near to shape and then glued it up and bent it to final shape on the board itself. My advice and what I will do next time is to use more layers and use 1/8" instead of 1/4". It would have saved a LOT of time and hassle that I spent bending the thicker stuff.

For the nose take a look at how I cut the nose at a vee and then stripped it and cut the strips to shape. This not only is easier than bending around the nose (which you will see in my build that I first tried that) but it is also more appealing to the eye in my opinion. Save time and headache! Do what I did- cut it at a vee, glue it up, and then saw the curve and shape it with a plane.

Good luck either way. Make sure you post pics!

Malcolm