How to Shape the Bottom of a Surfboard

Video Transcript

"ABE TOKE: Hi. Welcome to Expert Village, my name is Abe Toke. I'm going to take you through step by step to shape yourself a complete surfboard. What I'm going to do now is, like I said, we're going to get into the rails. I prefer to shape the bottom edge of the rail first. There are several different types of rails. There's kinda hard edge along this bottom. It's more Hawaiian style. I kinda use a softer edge. I don't know what kind of style that is, but it's a little bit softer than the Hawaiians use, or some of the Hawaiians, I should say. I'm going to start with the board just in a flat position like this, and I'm going to go ahead and pretty much around 45 starting on this part of the rail. Don't touch this last, I don't know, maybe third of the board. You can measure it out if you want. It's a good idea. Just go ahead and measure. Here's a foot so we know we want a hard edge behind that for sure. So you can measure it out. You don't have to. Some people do. I'll try to help you out. Take this firm in your hand. You can throw your weight on there. And we'll go ahead and [SOUNDS LIKE] work on this rail here. A foot off the nose, you want to be pretty delicate. This nose area just shapes out real easy. Once you get to that threshold, you want to keep it pretty close. Now, we have a pretty soft rail here so what you want to do is keep this fat line here if you want a fat rail. This one is going to be pretty much a 50-50 style rail which means the bottom is going to be pretty close to the top. And as I go, like I said, your hands tell you stuff your eyes can't, so I'll feel it. Once you get pretty happy with it, we'll go to the next part of the rail."