When I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, I built a surfboard in my backyard.
It was the first, and thankfully only, time I attempted this. I had no idea what I was getting into or what I was doing. Here’s the story.
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One day the surf was huge at the Surfside Jetty, and there were a few guys out riding it. At that time, there was no beach there, just big jetty rocks. If you lost your board, it was gonna get destroyed as the waves pounded into the rocks with full force at high tide. And, as would have it, one guy lost his board, and it went into the rocks. The guy gave it up as lost because it was too dangerous to try and go down there to retrieve it.
Later that day, when the tide went out, I went down there and got what was left of the board and took it home.
It was a score. The nose was broken off, but there was still just under 8 feet of the board intact and it was not even that badly dinged up.
I got it into my head that I could make a new board out of this.
It was balsa wood, so I would need to strip off the fiberglass and let it dry out for a couple of weeks before I started. In that time, I put together what I thought I needed for the job. I had a hand planer, saw, and a bunch of sandpaper to reshape it. I got my dad to buy me some fiberglass and resin from the boat yard across the highway.
Most boards were glassed with 18- or 20-ounce glass in those days; he got me 4-ounce. I thought, “Oh well, it will be lighter.”
A couple of paint brushes and buckets, and I was all set.
I didn’t have any racks to put the board on to do the work, so I used our redwood picnic table and benches. No clue as to how messy this was gonna be. When the wood was finally dry, I began construction on “Surfboards by Corky” No. 1. I was stoked.
With the saw, I made a new outline. The nose of the board was gone, but the tail was still intact, so I kinda used the existing tail and redid the front half. With the hand planer, I rounded and reshaped the rails and tried to give the nose area some lift. All in all, it came out looking pretty good.
I think I sanded on that thing for about two weeks until I was happy with the contours and all that. It was 7-by-11 feet and kind of a speed shape. So far, so good.
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The fiberglassing was a whole other adventure.
I did the top first. The fiberglass that my dad had bought came in 4 pieces. One was about 9 feet long and the other three pieces were all 3 feet long. There was plenty of width.
The top came out OK. It was the sanding that was a nightmare.
I lost patience after days of “glass itch” and seemingly getting very little accomplished. The bottom I had to do in three sections, overlapping. This made for even more sanding, which by now I was emotionally and physically done with.
So, it never got sanded enough, and there were rough edges all over the place. My answer to that was to just keep putting more resin on it until I got all the rough edges covered up.
Finally, I got to the last phase, the addition of the fin. Did I mention I had no clue as to what I was doing? I knew I had to glass the fin on, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep it standing up in place. So, I got the bright idea to stick it on with resin first, using two bricks to hold it in place while the resin dried. That outta work, yeah?
I did that one night before going to bed, thinking the resin would dry overnight and I could put the glass on the next day. And it worked; the resin did dry overnight. Unfortunately, the fin fell off, and the bricks were firmly glued to the board. My pals, who were on hand to see this, have not stopped laughing to this day. Even the dead ones are still laughing. Humph.
It finally got done and I took it out for a test ride. That thing actually worked very well.
The problem was there were still some rough and sharp edges due to my lack of sanding skills. I got a few cuts on my arms. So, the plan was to sand it better and go from there.
I am not sure what happened to it after that; it just sort of slipped from my memory. I do know that there was never a “Surfboards by Corky” No. 2. And I had to buy my mom a new picnic table from my paper route money.
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