From foam to wood - Frank Kaczmarek




This is what you can do when you break your foam board and you want a project to keep you busy.This is Franks story...







" Hi my name's Frank Kaczmarek and I live on the Gold Coast at Labrador. Earlier this year I broke my 9' "Evolve" longboard in a nasty head-high barrel that closed out on me at Burleigh. The board was custom made only a year earlier by Darren Dobbie. I ended up with two halves and no justification to spend another $1000 for a board, so decided to build my own. I'm quite handy with wood so I thought I'd give it a try. After looking on the web I put together a few Ideas and worked out my way to do it. I cut the remains of the old board into sections and made templates for the new board. I built a folding workbench from leftovers in the garage to work on, and to keep everything straight I've screwed right angle brackets to the bench and then clamp the centre stringer to that.
The board I'm building has a 4mm marine ply frame with a laminated 8mm centre stringer. The deck & bottom will be a combination of the marine ply strips, western red cedar strips from a local blind & shutter manufacturer and paulownia strips from John White. John is the one who passed on your Blog and email address to me.
As I work full time I am working on the board whenever I can, which is not as often and as much as I would like to.
I am now trying to finish the board by August so I can bring it along to the Alley on the 9th.
When finished it should be 9' X 23"X 3" approx.
Hope to see you at the alley in August."
Cheers,
Frank.

Thanks Frank for sharing your project and we look forward to progress reports and a ride review in August at The Alley.