Toy guns to Surfboards

I would like to welcome you and thank you for coming to my blog.  I have always wanted a blog and only just now found something I feel was 'blog worthy'.  I have decided to build not one, but several hollow wood surfboards and paddleboards in my garage and it's my hope that this blog will chronicle the process.  But knowing me, it's likely (and also my hope) that it ends up being more than just that.

For the love of wood...

Most of you know that I have a secret, OK not so secret, love affair with wood.  It all began when I was just a boy and my parents wouldn't let me buy or even play with toy guns.  So I stuck it to them and built a M111A sub machine gun out of wood scraps when I was 9.  But it wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I really honed my craft.  I obsessed over tools for quite a while and amassed quite a nice quiver of clamps, planes, chisels and power tools.  It was a great hobby that went completely awry, and out of that hobby 'Splinters' was created.  And, it's this side 'gig' of mine that has provided me an outlet for this obsession I have with all things wood.  It's my own 'dark passenger' only its really not so dark.  In fact a lot of good things have come out of it like this...


"The McDowell Beach Chair" (2010)



"Uncle Chips" Sideboard (2010)

Surfing the Great Lakes...

It was in grade 10, when my interest for toy guns had waned and my interest in grade 11 girls had waxed, that I saw the movie "North Shore".  Kid from the mid-west heads to Hawaii to surf the big waves.  It really spoke to me.  Especially since I grew up in the Toronto suburbs and the idea of surfing in the tropics seemed so cool, so awesome, so totally Rad!  But I think it was the movie "Point Break" that really sparked my interest in the surfing culture, so much so that the year it was released I did my OAC (grade 13 in Ontario) Physics paper on the hydrodynamics of surfing.  The following year when it was released on video, I wrote my first year Social Psych paper on the surfing sub-culture.  But again as a kid in Ontario, surfing just wasn't an option.  So I windsurfed.  And it kicked ass and in 1992 the chicks dug it. 

Here's where it all comes together....

Fast forward to the present and I have tried surfing, I own a surfboard, it's big, it's plastic, it's named Bertha.  I have ridden a wave on it and I have even turned it once or twice.  It's quite a haul to drag the entire family to Tofino to surf selfishly on the west coast.  But this summer hanging out with the Hoars in Kelowna there it was...


1987 Alpha 190 sailboard and 1968 grey owl canoe paddle

Paddleboarding. I know, it's just like me to jump on the bandwagon but it's fun and when Breckin spent 8 hours a day doing it, I knew we had to have one (or several).  So it was right then and there that I decided to build one (OK maybe not right then and there, but whatever).  But to build a 12 foot paddleboard seemed a little scary.  Especially since my buddy Glen (fellow bandwagon jumper, and cottage cowboy), also wanted one.  Now, to build two 12 footers seemed over the top.  I needed to practice on something smaller, less intimidating.  Enter Stu and Lana.  Two local surfers, among other things, that could help me with the process of building a smaller board.  So with the Internet I was able to find software to design a board in 3D and one afternoon we designed a 9' 6"  old school longboard.  The only thing left to do was build the goddamn thing.