Tuesday 13 March 2012

Raw Fish - 5' 9" x 21"

How goes it cyber surfers? This is a story about a fish I'm building ( my first). After watching the movie "One California Day" & seeing Joe Curran & Joel Tudor ripping on their fishes , I thought it might be time to give one a try - so why not build my own out of wood. After doing a bit of research on the net I came up with a design - pretty similar to Jim Banks's planshapes - but with a mccoy dome or convex bottom - most people go with concaves or flat bottoms - but I know the dome works on all the boards I've made - so cant see why it wont work on a fish. It was origionally going to be just a twinnie with keels - but quads get a big wrap - so I'm going to use 4 fin plugs & try it as a twinnie & a quaddie - why not experiment?

The timber used for skins & ribs is 6 mm Paulownia. I like to go with a 5mm plywood spine for a bit of extra strength. Ribs are 6 inches apart.  The board is going to be finished with tung & orange oil. Glue used Titebond 111

DIMENSIONS :
5 ft 9 inch X 21 inch X 2 3/4 inch


       Heres some pix



                          Chine strips secured with sewing pins inserted using multi grips


                                           Frame clamped to rocker table during assembly


                      Frame secured to a second rocker table with bottom facing up - ready
                                                      for bottom skins to be glued on

     


                                          First bottom strip 145 mm wide X 6mm thick






This is the tail end - that block of wood attached to the spine is only temporarily in place to help hold the skin to the spine when gluing - It will be cut off when I jigsaw the fish tail outline