| vagabondsurf.com It's about life - not "lifestyle" |
 |
 |
 |
| MINI PAIPO MODEL 597 |
| It was late summer and nothing new was happening. I was bored again, feeling restless, and the surf had gone flat as it will this time of year. I hadn't cleared out space to really make anything, and there was no money in the budget for even the barest of raw materials for a foam and fiberglass bellyboard. My wife and I were in Home Depot one Sunday morning, looking at hardware for some kind of project. There was a section in the lumber area that was devoted to a psuedo-Ikea laminated pine component system. I noticed it when I was trying, and failing, to find a decent piece of pine shelving for the house. They had a rack of one piece that was about 23 inches long and 16 inches wide, with channels grooved in four places along one side. I laughed, picked up a piece, and said "Channel bottom". The shelf was only $5.97 (Model 597 - get it?) |
| Top (above). Bottom (right). |
| I had recently gone through piles of old surf magazines, and just two days before had re-read some Surfer's Journals. In an interview with Bob Cooper he had said that the width of early foam surfboards, roughly 22", was established by the width of earlier balsa boards. Apparently 22" was the usual width early board builders came up with once they had laminated balsa boards (4"x4"?) together to make their blanks. Cooper was quoted as saying that one time Tom Morey made a wider board just to see what he would get - just a challenge of assumptions. That made me think of bodyboarding history, again Tom Morey, and the rumored notion that the original dimensions of the first production bodyboards were adapted to match the UPS or U.S. Mail size restrictions of the time - roughly 42" in length or somewhere in that neighborhood. The fact that bodyboards have changed little in dimensions since that point, certainly if compared to the first 30 years of foam surfboard design, kind of made me snicker and then groan. Anyhow, there I was at Home Depot, with wickedness on the brain and wood in the hand. So to speak. |
| A traditional Hawaiian Paipo board is made of wood. In recent decades it's been plywood. But old surfboards often used pine among other woods. Since it was an impulse purchase, I got home really with no clue for design. I measured off one hand width across the center, bodyboard-style, and then drew the nose curve off a 9'6" Takayama noserider. That left a few inches of square rail, which I figured to roll under into the channel. Shown at left is the rough cut. |
 |
| Copyright (C) 2002. All rights reserved. ***** |