How to Clean the Lines on 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. I'm going to go ahead and clean up this bottom a little bit, and then we'll go ahead and do the top. And I'm going to clean it up with the shearform again. When you run your hands across the bottom, you can really feel a high spot or a low spot. I mean you can obviously see that we're a little low here still, but just keeping--you don't want to dig in to this and try to make it up right now. So just keep on shaping the board is one whole thing. Don't stop in here and dig away and trying to hit a home run with every little stroke. It's more important that it really stays flat. Once you start shaping off the bottom a little bit, you'll notice that the stringer will start to pop up. That's when it's a great time to break out this hand planer and just hit the stringer alone. Careful not to--you don't want to reshape this bottom that much so you just really want to just take as consistent smooth cut off the stringer. I usually start somewhere around the apex of the bottom contour which is generally around the middle of the board and just flow right off the nose. Once I'm pretty happy with the relatively flat, I got most of the marks out. I'm going to go ahead and flip it over. The stringer is pretty hard to shape, so I usually tend to get that down and then you can shape the foam to the stringer, starting on the high points always first."