| Here are some of the handboards Jon has made. You can pretty much see the development, as each buildout gives new knowledge. I'd bet dollars to donuts the width of the middle one was determined by the width of the board it came from. That sounds lame on first read (except for those of us who've done, and do, the exact same thing, eh?), but then consider this: Bob Cooper commented in an article in Surfer's Journal that the standard 22 inch length of the early foam boards was established by the width of the balsa blank glue-ups, which was determined by the size of the balsa pieces (roughly 4"x4"). For hand-planing devices the first jump in performance is any improvement over the surface of the hand. |
