Well, it seemed to me that waiting around for some kind of divine inspiration wasn't doing the trick, so on Friday I made myself go out and shape the fish pictured above. It felt really good to get out there, break out the ol' Skil 100 and get covered in foam again. And the AC in the shop definitely helped with the "feeling good" part. The board came out not bad, just needs some fine tuning, then for me to make a set of keels for it, then it'll be ready to glass.
Here's a sneak peak at my new film called Henry Beats the Heat. It will be a full shot done in one long take of my dog, wearing a woman's gardening hat, lying on the grass in 90 degree sunshine, panting. It will be a hit among the art cinema crowd. It'll be five minutes long, but shot on my one roll of Super 8 film I have lying around. "It can't be done!" you are probably shouting. "Five minutes on one Super 8 roll?! IMPOSSIBLE!" Well, that will be the secret to the film's success. It'll be like a loaves and fishes thing.
OK, I'll shut up now. Time to go get sushi anyway.
Bardo Pond, "A Tune," off of the collection Batholith. I really enjoy shaping boards to music like this, at least I did on Friday. It really allows my mind to focus on what I'm doing and I find everything, the tools, the blank, the music, and me, flows together. It's a really nice feeling.
Well, it's been a while, but I've been busy with a few things. First of all, I finished Frank's board, SF 006, a little over a month ago. It came out out pretty nice, Frank's comics ended up looking really good on there, that is before they got covered by his filthy wax. He also likes how the board rides, which is a matter of peripherality, but cool none the less. Here are some pictures:
Before...
...and after!
From RastaFish to Fangfish. This was a pretty interesting project, and not only because I was excited about the shape we were doing for the board, which is 5'4" x 19 5/8" x 2 5/16" (or something like that) with a relaxed rocker (it did come from a fish) and a fairly full foil throughout, and a single wing thing going into those fangs at the tail. The cool thing about this was that this was Frank's first board when he started surfing seriously again within the past number of years, and so it suited him fine then, but as his skills progressed he left the board behind. Now, through the magic of evolution, the board has transmogrified into a shape that matches his current skill lever. Will the wonders of Nature never cease? No, they won't.
So after Frank's board, I glassed a board for a friend of a friend. Now, with that completed, I've started on SF 007, a garbology project in that all the foam has come from the garbage. The main body is from a stripped longboard blank that I found in someone's garbage on Clay St. in Tuckerton, as reported here. I'm using rail cutoffs, which I think came from 004, to fill out the width, and part of a broken Boneyard surfboard I found in the trash on 25th St. in Surf City sometime during the summer of '09 to fill out the nose. I think I'm going to get something like 5'2" or so out of it. Maybe shorter.
Something very gnarly was done to this tail around the fin. While grinding this off, I found chopped strand mat, bondo, some strange black cloth, brown all purpose resin, and even some metal pins.
Gluing and fastening these rails was pretty fun. I felt like, and imagine it looked like, a person wrestling an alligator.
Well, I started this post this morning, and am finishing it post-Thanksgiving Dinner. Jeannine and I hosted a decent crowd of 12 and have way too many leftovers. It was a lot of fun and a good time, and I really didn't get too full. Surf's up tomorrow, hopefully.
Since today is Thanksgiving, I wanted to post Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant," but since I couldn't find a satisfactory version online, and since dropio has discontinued their streaming audio service, I didn't. You should still listen to it though, as it is a classic. Instead, I decided to post almost the complete opposite. Here is Bardo Pond, with the first track off of their album Ticket Crystals, "Destroying Angel." Really a great song, and you should check out that album for an amazing version of "Cry Baby Cry," by some band called the Beatles.
This blog was started as a way to chronicle my adventures into surfboard shaping and just surfing in general. Since its inception, it has evolved into a log of whatever I feel like rambling about and sharing with the world, including, but not limited to: photographs, bicycles and bicycling, film, music, gardening, cute pictures of Henry, and more.
