Research & Design of the Board

Hello, My name is Shawn Carner, shortly after a few paddles on our new Rusty 10'10" SUP my wife and I got for Christmas I got the bug to build a wooden board. I recently finished building a wooden paddle for my SUP and it was a very enjoyable build and before I even looked it up online I figured I could build a board similar to the model airplane wings I used to make out of balsa wood.  Little did I realize how close I was to that thinking. Some quick Google searches revealed a lot of information, some of it free and some of it people were selling.  In this blog I plan to chronicle my build and aggregate everything I learn, so it may hopefully help you out too.

I found the site to Jack Young's Book "How to Build a Hollow Wooden Surfboard" pretty quickly and decided to pay for the $30 book, and really liked what Jack had put together and it is worth the money (I won't recreate what jack's book details in this blog since his information is copyrighted and that wouldn't be fair to him).

The plans I created, are above and based on the methodology of what Jack outline's.  However I plan to modify his approach slightly to see if I can reduce some of the weight from how he builds his rails, especially since I'm building a 12'6" elite racer SUP.  I've seen that several custom kayak builders and few of the pre-cut wooden surfboard kits like Grain Surfboards use a cove and bead style stripping to create the rails and curve forms.  I've decide to use this approach for my racer style board since it shares a lot of design ideas from kayaks, more than wave riding surfboards.
I also recently stumbled upon a kayak design software that is really amazing, especially that it is donationware from Blue Heron Kayaks, called Kayak Foundry, I was able to test my design for stability and hull speed calculations and develop the rib forms for printout and easy cutting from the 1/8" Luan Plywood (i plan to do this after Christmas, and post the  results).

Board Design using the Kayak Foundry Software