Thursday, October 14, 2010

Tri-Fins, double-foil x 3 for 10'-6" Al Merrick Gun

Woods: Redwood lace burl, sandwiched between quilted maple.

This incredible board is a colaboration by al Merrick and Larry fuller. I have done lots of fins and finsets for Larry's special boards. I was stoked to get to help with this one. It began as a solid redwood board by Al. Larry Supplied the wood, Old groth California heart redwood from a defunct winery in northern California. The wood was once part of a room-sized cask that aged california red wine. Larry has his own secret (really) sources for incredible woods. Larry took the shaped board apart at Jimmy Phillips shop and chambered it, bringing the pre-glass weight from around 110 lbs.....to about 28lbs. In this photo, I had just finished cheater-coating the board with a 50/50 laminating resin and styrene mix, an absolutely necessary step to prevent the wood from "gassing" as well as absorbing too much resin when glassed. The same treatment was required for the redwood fins.


2 comments:

Erik Olson said...

Wow... that's an incredible project!

JCWC said...

Erik! Thanks.
good to hear from you bro! JC