rodndtube.com's (OLD) MyPaipoBoards Forums. Reading but no posting on the OLD forums.

[Poobah]

Here's the latest from Jeff C. up in Los Osos. He didn't supply a name, so for now I'll just refer to it as Wide Load. Jeff wrote:

Kirk, god bless his soul, drove down into the belly of the beast to Aquatech in Venice today to pick up my new custom bellyboard. Gino and the boys did a magnificent job of the glassing of it, and from these photos, it really looks like it’s turned out pretty much how I envisioned it. All hail also to Brian Hilbers, who did an excellent job fleshing out my template ideas so well. Despite mass protestations to the contrary, I’ve found that many shapers are simply NOT that creative, and something like a short, wide, bellyboard is really a hugely confusing curve ball for them on several levels. Brian, as Kirk said he would, really did an excellent job of thinking it all through, and his interpretation of the concept turned out more than beautiful....
It’s 5-6 by 26” wide by maybe 3 3/8th’s thick? This boat is all about the width; that was the ‘new’ premise that I wanted to follow on this particular one. Brian used US Foam for the blank and took a standard fish blank (*to get the thickness required…) and added two separate, 1.0” spacers on either side of the stringer to get the width needed (*you can see the glue lines when looking at the bottom…). These past couple of years, I’ve been utilizing ‘two by five’ bellyboards (24” wide x 5’), and I thought that the design might make a bit of a leap forward if I widened it up some…? The spacers were a great answer, and gave Brian the extra width needed to stretch the template. At it’s genesis, it’s kind of a standard Greenough template, modified to suit my needed eccentricities. I love the curve of that tail, you don’t see that on many surfboards….

[rodndtube]

Damn, that is tons of width and thickness! Looking forward to hearing more about how it rides. Is the length a misread? 56 inches or 66 inches?
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rodNDtube
"Prone to ride"
I love my papa li`ili`i

[DaGRizTX]

One sweet looking ride...hope to hear a report as to how it rides soon.
Interesting location for the leash plug...

Sea-ya
_________________
Twenty years fron now you will be more
disappointed by the things you
didn't do than by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover.

-Mark Twain

[supergrom]

That is beautiful.
I'd love to try a board on that scale sometime.

[MeatyBarrels]

That board looks like a rocket! I've ridden a board that size before and liked it a lot (not quite as wide though). It did take me while adjust my style to the length but, once I did it was amazing. The longer board seemed a so much faster down the line to me.
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So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.