A few extras

Here's a few pics that got sent to us this week.

Our boy Fergie's feet through a Miller Vortex bottle. Not a bad pic... I think it's almost worth framing and hanging on the wall personally. Something about the blurry edges really works for me.

 Our Santa Cruz rip-grom Barrett, Shredding what looks like the left bowl at Sharks...

 Another closeup shot of the board for the logjam.

 And last but not least, Jason hotdogging on the nose. -Carl

Mini Asym Spacecraft

Man I love this stuff. My buddy Brian's new Asym mini just finished up, I couldn't help but take a bunch of pictures of it... So stoked,  I can't wait to hear his ride report and also take it for a spin. So many weird fin possibilities to get the mind turning... Enjoy. -C

New Website Video

After  getting a fair bit of video clips under our belt, it is always fun to put them together and see what comes out. This time around it was pretty much all from this winter here in Hawaii ( except one hot MEKP mix at the sc shop). Here you go...

Where to start...

Knew you'd like that. The crew over at Hotline used our boards in a recent photo shoot, and we got dibs on the pics... figured it would be worth a share. 

Then there's this guy. My good friend/sporadic team rider/R&D expert Tanner Beckett showed some real initiative and showed up at my door with his very first hand shape. Not too shabby either. We got it all squared away and got it going in the lam room. I've been telling this guy to try shaping for over a decade now... I figure when he gets to about board 10 or so I'll start hitting him up for a "Bro deal" ...what goes around comes around!

This last weekend was lining up to be a reallly good one...

Somehow though, I woke up Saturday morning to this. Brutal when you consider that there was only 5 people really involved. 

Somehow I managed to drag my ass over to the shop though. I look like I'm gunna throw up in this picture. Either that or fall over on the board. Nothing like foam dust to really kick a solid hangover in the ass. 

Some cool boards finishing up though. Here's a fuller template shortboard with a bit flatter rocker for my favorite lanky tall guy Paulie 

A Midrange with a nice 50/50 split red resin tint for Ben up in SF.

Another Midrange, this time as a clear sanded finish. Showing the bottom on this one so you can see the 2+1 fin setup. This one is for Tim

And a custom copy for Robin, it was originally an old Tudor. Looks better with a couple birds on it. 

And last but not least, Here's a sneak preview of the board I'm doing for the Logjam It's a local old logging contest, it'll be in the raffle. -Carl 

Two Crows Shirts

I was avoiding the glassing room today after polishing out Seth's new board, I just wasn't feeling the resin. These days are good to be spent sanding or polishing but today I was all caught up in that department. What's a guy to do. Luckily Cody had picked up a bunch of blank shirts the other day, so I figured I would do a bit of sampling with all the screens we had made. A few came out really nice but I have a hard time not getting pigment on the areas are supposed to be clean. The first shirt I grabbed I somehow managed to get orange on the nice clean white shirt (Thats why I where black). Eventually I got it under way and managed to get about 6 dozen shirts made. Here is some pics from the day. -n



Here is Seth's board. Thanks for the Tall Boys!

Surfboard builders die younger

Scripty

Health Care shirt.

Planner Hot Rodin'

I saw the last post of Carl Hot Rodin' his 653. It got me thinking, I wonder if the amount of time he spends tricking his planner is greater than the amount of times he saves shaping each surfboard. It's pretty rad either way. I am probably just envious there isn't much room for change on a DeWalt ginder. Or is there...?
-n


Here is a vid of Carl changing his mower planner over to the custom vacum mount. Before he starts his Hawaii batches where he hand shapes 15 board in less than week, He always does a complete overhaul. I got to give the guy credit, his planners hardly give him problems in the middle of a board.  Preventative measures.

Planer Madness

Man... this is NOT a post about how I spent hours and hours modding my planer today. It could be, but it's not. Instead I hope it's a motivational read for you guys... read through and you'll see why. Up above is the main control lever of my 653. Without going too far into detail, it uses a small cam to raise and lower the depth adjustment on the planer. To the right it a simple mock-up that I did planning out my approach for altering the adjustment from 3/16 of and inch to 3/8. Doubling the size of the cam would basically double the depth the planer can cut. My kind of planer. Twice the depth equals half the passes. Mmm twice the speed. When Nick's downstairs at the shop cracking cold ones and I'm still treading circles around the racks... you can see why this kind of stuff circles around in my mind. 

     Only problem is, I've been dwelling on this modification for at least 5 years... maybe even 7. It's literally been popping into my head every single time I picked up my 653. Something that I needed to to do as soon as I got the time. Well, I finally got around to it. Here's how it unraveled. 

Firing up a little CAD/CAM/CNC action I redesigned that little cardboard cut out into an actual part (a few of them actually) and cut it out on my desktop mill I have setup for these kinds of little jobs. 

I could ramble on for hours about the whole setup, but take it as it is, it's just another tool in the arsenal. Perhaps a bit Ironic using CNC to make tools to hand shape with methinks. Every tool has its place though.

Ah here we go. Beautiful. The picture is a little skewed but here you have the old lever and the new one (Its made of wood, cheap and fast to prototype with) ...looks great but guess what... IT DOESN'T WORK!!!!!!!
Man-O-man-O-man. Talk about 5 years of wasted thought. I should have mocked out the idea years ago when I had it. Then I would have simply noticed that there was a huge flaw involving other parts of the tool that prevents this idea from working.
The good news is, after one glance at the failed idea, my mind was free to come up with a better one. I decided that I wasn't going to sit on the idea for another 5 years. I got right to it, I had all my stuff strewn about already anyhow.

It looks similar but it's a totally new design... It's totally crude right now.... I had to hack at it with the dremel a bit to get it working. But it work it does. Extremely well too. Nick always says something like do it now, do it fast, do it dirty and sort the details out later. Annoying how right he can be sometimes.
So if you're sitting around on the couch with a great idea, best get to it now. It's probably not going to work, but at least you can get it out of the way and make room for a new one that might have potential. Don't waste the space in your head for the next 5 years. :) -C

653

Behold the Porter-Cable/Rockwell 653 Planer. In my opinion it's one of the gnarliest planers ever made. It's much more powerful than a skil 100, it can cut much deeper, and it's just mean. 

But it has several limitations- it's heavy, no real on-the-fly depth adjustment, and it's awkward to use.  Mine has always been used to do deep passes here and there as a fall back plan when serious foam needs to get taken off blanks in a hurry. But I've always fantasied about fixing the limitations of the machine so it could be used as a universal shaping machine. A long conversation with maestro Wayne Rich about the tool really got my mind turning on how to solve some of the problems... so I finally got around to a total tear down. I'm going through all the parts to figure out where I can cut weight by drilling holes and also fabbing new ones to replace un-needed heavy ones. Poor thing looks pretty sad in this picture. :( I think I'm gunna powercoat the whole thing black when I'm done... should be pretty awesome. CNC mill is on the left, I'm gunna be using it to make a few custom parts.

When it's all said and done, I'm hoping that it'll be lighter to lug around and be able to cut a whopping 3/8" pass- twice that of the popular Skil 100.

 Sweet lucky green hat left over from St. Patty's

 Got some boards going through the shop- Paulies fish/Shortboard

 And Tim's Midrange.

 Betty is getting ready for an overhaul for the 2012 contest season. She won't make the trip to the bu without some real work. So I figured one last shot for posterity before she starts getting taken apart too. Bodywork, new suspension and a few other updates are in the works. That's a good girl. :) -C

New moves

Here is a few pictures from the shop today. Tuesdays are when FGH(Fiberglass Hawaii) delivers so if you forget to order something on Monday, you have to rush the cop Gontlet in Wahiawa to get any materials throughout the week. A big fail. Good thing I got 5 more boxes of gloves and a new roll of 30" cloth. Ready to lam.

-n

The prelim

Here is Tomo taking full advantage of the Two Crows Surfboards Test Flight Program.

I orderd a color of everything. For a glasser, having this kind of inventory is like having a tomb full of gold. Notice the hawaiian rainbow layout.

Was a bit blury when I left the shop...... sorry

Colorful days

Here is a couple pics of the boards going through the shop, a lot of different styles too. The full freestyle, some color into color, a handful of stripes here and there. Plenty of color everywhere. My partner in crime for all the art shows, Seanzo, stopped in with artist Thomas Cambell. Thankfully I had a bunch of pieces in the works. Without works in progress I feel like I' am missing something.-n

A little bit of script on this red rockett

This board is tiny if you can't tell. It's a groms first board.

Matt's 6'4

and the 6'. A bit camoflauge...

A little mini simms. I still had some of the color mixed up so I put it in the leash loop. I forgot how cool it looks, I hadn't done it in ages.

Seth's color into color action

A Green Weekend

     St. Patrick's day is about as green as a board builder can get, lucky for us it fell on the weekend. With the boards moving through the shop it was easy to take the day off. The North Shore had fun surf all around. After a good day in the water a few green bottles (thanks Rayna!) got consumed, cheers-ing the sunset with good friends.
    Sunday was a half day holiday. A slow move into the shop to finish CJ's board before I drive into town for a surf and beers. My friend Matt and I head to Toot's house to drop of boards and check the waves. Pretty small but perfect for logging. We traded boards out at Queens, sampling each others logs to see what's going on. Toots' board turns out to be even slower than my log, perfect for those slow rolling waves.
Post surf we all caught up over beers, talked stories, and ate some interesting soup :)
-nick





here is a board Daniel Jones pulled out of his stash of sweet old boards. I love the template on this thing.

Check out the fin set up, they seem like RedX fin boxes, but  twin fins with a transition base. A little more advanced than the Wavestorm.

Here is the first one done of the batch. Many more to come in the next few days. Keep posted.