Rail channels

Your post's all good with me Cuttlefish.

Yeah Brad Tucker rebuilt the board, the way to do it ( I rebuilt a busted 17 footer previously) is to build a rocker jig for it if you don't have one, then place the pieces in the correct place on the jig and cut away the bottom planking to reveal the framing... then 'sister the broken frames and replace any rail blocking , scarf new bottom planking in ( at which point the rocker holds) then turn the board over and repair deck planking.

It's an epic mind bender. When I rebuilt the 17 footer ( which was in 5 main pieces and some kindling ) I nearly burnt the board instead but went for it in small doses and 18 months later she was back in the water and is still going.

The foam and glass is much stronger than an unglassed wooden board.

I glassed the rail channeled board today with 3 layers of 10oz and epoxy top and bottom, it went pretty well.


The 'self regulating' comment of Lavarat's is pretty much correct, it's true of the handling as well.

Ok here is some epic viewing from the archives: first up is 'scumbag' I received so much hate mail when this was published that i took it down for a decade, but here it is again in 240p glory.

The videos are from a particularly low period in my surfing life.

We were getting to the end of a long period of bus based gypsy lifestyle living, we'd been rent free on 40 acres of land in downtown Mount Maunganui ( just next to the airport) for 5 years just surfing and building boards, that came to an end and we wound up renting land from two consecutive buggers who were certifiably insane and bad bastards to boot... I sold my compound bow one day because I didn't trust myself not to shoot the first one of these cretins. We got back on the house owning thing again after that but moved inland to do it. I kept surfing throughout but looking back it affected the ride.

I won't bore yopu with all the stories, but just as an example, our first stop after the Mount 'maunganui stint was on a piece of land owned by Bastard no.1.... the first morning after we arrived he decided to simultaneously evict me and get my wife to move in to his house with him. She declined. He had a business and one of his employees told me that he used to hide tools and then accuse them of losing them so he could dock their pay.... his niece and her boyfriend lived on another house on the same piece of land, the BF who was not to be messed with also came close to drastic violence due to the continual harrassment e.g. cutting of theor power if they were half an hour later than usual paying the rent... all of which went on booze anyway. One day Bastard1 said to me "Mr Stuart if I'm out this afternoon just put the rent inside my Bible on top of the fridge. The $175 was duly put inside the Bible... next morning a hung over B came charging across the paddock fist waving and yelling that i'd stolen the rent money back out of the Bible... ffs if i was going to do that I wouldn't have bothered putting it in the bible in the first place.

Then he used to insist upon letting his Pit Bull terrier loose to attack my dog (a Doberman/bull terrier )... while my dog was tied up... one day the Pit Bull had a go and my dog ripped his throat big time. I told B's friend who was the only one home what had happened and he looked at the dog and said no problem he's a pitbull ( it didn't look so bad as the giant flap of neck had sort of flapped back into place hidden under the fur). When B came home and fed his dog all the food piled out through the hole in the throat. B kept the dog tied up after that.

One day I was walking towards B's house and he was coming along the path the other way... suddenly as he passed he just shot his arm out and grabbed me around the throat with his great fat paw. I flung his hand off and his ugly chrome dome went down to waist level... I was poised to smash him right in the dome but self control got the better of me. That was the day I sold the bow, never been so angry in my life.

Not long after that i returned home to find that my surf vehicle ( 1972 Dodge ambulance had been moved... it turned out that B had unnecessarily decided to move it a few yards with his bulldozer, he'd wrapped a chain around the front axle and completely bent the tie rod, I'm like wtf? he replied that he hadn't given me permission to park machinery there... where it had always been parked.

Bastard no.2 was a pommy who ran his wife as a prostitute, he kept on going on about how she needed lots of clothes for her job, I didn't ever ask what the job was but that's what she was, frigging 'Lisalulu' the whore. Plus he sold moonshine. None of this bothered me in the least, but his actions did. B2 had a black belt in karate but as it turned out he squealed like a stuck pig and called the cops claiming that he was threatened with murder when spoken to politely on the day the ** finally hit the fan. When the local Maori heavies found out what he'd done to us they cleaned his place out, and would have beaten the crap out of him if he hadn't run off as fast as he did. B2 had dobbed one of their fellows in previously for something he hadn't done. They asked me if I wanted anything else done to the B2 ( in addition to stealing everything in his house and making him move out of it for fear of his life) but we thought that being married to Lisalulu was punishment enough for any bloke. He also kept pigs in such a state of filth cold and malnourishment that the spca had to be called in.

One of B2's best tricks was when he called the Cops, the Bailiff, the Council, the Fire Brigade, the Ministry of Education, Department of Conservation and the Social Welfare ( CYPS) and make up a pack of lies about us. I got up one morning and they were all there... they had to queue up at the gate.... B2 had already brought his wife and kids over and set up an outdoor table and chairs with umbrella and refreshments to watch the show, which they proceeded to do.

Anyway after the grilling by every govt agency in the book they went away empty handed as we were clean. They did do B2 for running an illegal motor camp though... there were three families there in buses and house trucks.

Then he let his huge boar loose in the paddock the buses were in, with lots of little kids around... he'd previously told us how dangerous the beast was... it was a hyper agressive boar to be sure... the kids learnt to climb trees very fast. My two eldest boys ( aged 14 and 12) made a plan ( I didn't know about it) to spear the boar and fashioned a mighty boar spear then confronted the animal with it ... they got pounded and trampled before going up the trees again.

Surfing and board building continued between times.

Somehow though B1 nd B2 got in contact with each other and joined forces, then it got really ugly.

I feckin hate renting. Free camp or own your own I reckon.

... but I digress....

Roy....After that snippet......Stop building boards for a while and write a book.then you could settle down to the life you want

But wait, there's more....

^OK lol +1

Thanks chaps,

The mayhem started when we left Raglan in ''89. Emma and I had both been at the University of waikato, we met at the Uni newspaper office where she was the lewd gossip columnist and I was the newspaper delivery man. We were married 5 weeks later, after which it was revealed that she owned a waterfront section in Whale Bay Raglan, which she'd bought with money from an accident payout when she'd been run over in Boston by a drunken Italian a few years previously. So, we embarked on the lifestyle of choice, which was to get 'housing corp' loan to build the dream surf house while joining Geoffrey Palmer's surf team ( i.e going on the dole). In those days it was all 'money for nothing'.

So, we built a three storey cedar clad pole house and spent the next three years surfing ( singlefins only of course) and partying.

It got a bit stale after a while so we decided to sell up and move to Great Barrier island.

Subrtitzky's barge heading for the Colville channel, she sailed once a week, a 9 hour trip on a good day, a bunch of surfboards on a van can be seen.

A Commer Avenger:

Yeah it gets lots of waves, Kaitoke can get good waves, here's the next beach over on a typical day:



Okiwi is an epic bar break, but very exposed and infested with stigrays and a few sharks:



Before heading off in the bus I'd given my boards away thinking that I'd had enough of surfing...

It can be, stay tuned to find out