Experimenting With Hand Boards

Well, I got bored last weekend and realized I haven't made anything in the shop recently--my last project was almost every evening and almost every weekend for over 4 months building a custom queen sized bed with incorporated foot trunk, two shadow box end tables and a shadow box coffee table. (a paying project) So, after a month long hiatus I was getting the itch to build something new.

I didn't want to get too involved with something I would have had to commit serious amounts of time to, but I knew I wanted to experiment with something I've never done--building some sort of water craft. I figured I should start small, so I decided to mess around with some hand boards. I started going through my racks of scraps and cut-offs and pulled out some OG Heart Pine, Black Walnut, Quilted Maple and Wenge. I commenced with re-sawing, dimensioning, planing and joining and wound up with some stock I could make a couple blanks from. While they were glued up I sketched out a fat fish-like template on cardboard and cut it out with an exacto knife when I was satisfied with the lines.

(I will go ahead and apologize in advance for the crappy pics taken from a dusty cell phone)

On to drawing out the template and cutting the rough shape:

 

One one plane I went with a classic offset stripe using the OG Pine for the majority, a smaller strip of Black Walnut and finished off with some Quilted Maple. The other one is dominantly Quilted Maple with a Wenge "stringer."

I'm trying to incorporate as many variables as I can to see if any make a difference in performance, so I decided to do the Pine one as a deep stepped single concave with two incorporated skegs at the tail and the Maple one with a single vee throughout most of the board and deep double concave. Since I'm experimenting I just drew reference lines on the boards, broke out a router, stuck a 1 1/2" fluting bit in it and went to town:

 

Now that I had the boards fully roughed out it was time to get down to what represents over 50% of carpentry... sanding.
This is where I realized I should have been a little more careful in routing the concaves when stepping the bit down. My lines turned out fairly straight and uniform, but leaving those harsh transitions doubled my sanding time.
I sanded my rail profiles on the bottoms then flipped the boards over, threw a 1/2" round-over bit on the router and did the same on the top, fairing out the noses and slightly rounding the tails with more considerable sanding. Then I filled some knot voids with epoxy and that's pretty much how they sit right now.



I'm leaning towards finishing them with Helmsman spar urethane but will probably start using epoxy in the future.

I still haven't figured out what I am going to use for the hand straps and exactly how I'm going to attach them to the boards. I'll probably go a quick and dirty route on these then upgrade on the next ones I make.

That's it for now, I hope to get some more done on them over the next few days. I hope y'all enjoy!

 

Hell, at some point I'll even measure them and post the dimensions.... I have no idea what they are.

 

Sure do. I use solid wood so they're pretty pricey. A buddy and I have a side woodworking "business," we do custom orders for things like coffee tables and keep tree swings, coasters and cutting boards in stock... although we need to play catch-up because our stock is extremely low--been too busy with grown-up stuff.

Thanks man, I hope to crank out a vid or at least get a couple pics of them in action... one day.

I've probably got a little over 4 hours in them so far. Once I get them dialed in I will probably be able to make 4 or 5 at a time with 5-6 total hours work time. Beer drinking and "getting safe" time not included.

I hope to get my production method dialed in at some point then ad them as a stock fixture for our wood shop. But right now we've really been dropping the ball on our interweb marketing, our etsy account is inactive right now and we haven't updated jack on FB in a while. My partner has a 1.5 year old and one in the oven, so neither of us have had time lately.

Yeah, with a big-ass 1.5" fluting bit. I'm going to use a combination of that and some other bits next time in an effort to reduce rough sanding. I free-handed this one and plan on making some templates and jigs once I find what bottom designs work best.

 

I probably won't have them done for over a week unfortunately.

 

Clemson: Those Sapele boards are going to look absolutely awesome in the sun! I was thinking about making some keel fins but figured I would wait until I experiment with another couple designs. Do you plan on glassing your hand boards?

And dude, for the love of Gawd.... please stop using Gorilla Poo! Or never, ever, ever buy it once you use what you have up. Titebond Ultimate all the way! (Sorry, I have to razz people whenever I see evidence of Gorilla Poo)

RobG: That thing looks sleek man. Since yours is Paulownia (I think), what did you finish it with? From the pics it looks like you waxed it.

The bottom contour is almost exactly what I was originally thinking about going for but I didn't want to go too thin on the first go-round--mainly because I've been thinking about putting threaded bungs into the deck to attach the strap with machine screws instead of wood screws and didn't want to come anywhere near going through the entire board by accident. So, I went a little thicker and started with a 1" or so thick blank and went from there--I think both boards are about .33" at their thinnest points, so my over-all concave is pretty aggressive but I kept the rails pretty thick and soft.

Where did you get that strap? It looks a little more churched-up than I was originally thinking about for mine since they are technically "quick and dirty," but I guess I might as well go for the gold if I can get my hands on some straps like that. How did you attach them?


I've started the first coat of Helmsman on the bottoms last night and am about to run out and put the first coat on the top here in a minute. I'll post some more pics a little later...

 

Thanks man!