Grain Surfboards - The Steamer day 2

Original photo by Clayton Plummer

This past weekend I spent Friday through Monday working with eight other surfers and the guys from Grain Surfboards building one of their Steamer Kits in the back parking lot of Patagonia Cardiff.

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Day 1 was a lot of work.  I felt great at the end of the day, slept like a baby that night, and woke up ready to charge head-on into day 2!

Some of the guys got up early enough to go for a surf before the start of day 2.  I wasn't one of those people.  It looked like fun watching them with my coffee in hand, though.

Saturday, day 2, dawned with the boards railed and ready for us to start using spokeshaves and block planes to get the pieces of wood fair (wood working term for smooth, round, and continuous).  Once we had shaved all of the wood down (very thin in some spots) we sanded everything with 80 grit sandpaper and prepared the surface for more titebond glue as well as some 3M 5200 marine adhesive.

Original photo by Clayton Plummer

The final step for day two was to get the top deck glued onto the planed and sanded rails.  Once the deck was set, we used a cool lattice work of boards, more spring clamps, and rope to squeeze everything together.  The bottom of the boards are contoured in this process using some cool CNC machined, unique, and individual piece of wood for each section of the board.  Each set of CNC pieces was unique to the type of board.  So, the pieces for my Steamer were different from The CI Biscuit pieces, The Seed pieces, and all of the other boards in our class.  One other guy had a Steamer in the class.  The remaining six boards were different.

The million dollar questions for every passer-by was either "Is that Balsa wood?" or "Is that thing solid?"  It was pretty interesting how many people came by that had wooden surfboards.

Grain Surfboards is headquartered in Portland, Maine.  Amazingly enough, there had to be a hundred transplants that now live in the Cardiff are; it was quite the reunion all day.  It made me laugh, only because I'm a transplant from Michigan.

The final highlight of the day was all of the dogs!  So many people in Cardiff have French Bulldogs.  They are so cute with their little satellite ears!!  Along with my hard work, I had plenty of dog therapy.

Clayton