CUSTUM PADDLES ??????

[loosehead]

thanks for the pic`s and explaination.i sent you a pm yeterday,i have been trying caron fiber sleeves and shrink tubing but this looks much better.just trying to figure out a good way to attach the blade.thanks again

[LaPerouseBay]

Beautiful paddles nichawaii.

I have a friend that does custom carbon paddles here on Maui.  To see them in person always shocks me. 

Pictures don't do your work justice.  The finish work, the one of a kind, custom sizing and flex put your paddles in another league. 

Stoked  to hear you are so busy.  Frankly, I'm not surprised.  Custom carbon paddles are works of art. 

[surfniels]

Great looking stuff thanks for posting!

[blackeye]

No one is doing it currently that I know of, but both design mods have interesting possibilities, especially either for people who like a huge catch or for making a very narrow blade

And they would be easy for custom and amateur builders to fabricate with strips of core material glued onto the blade core.  Attach the strips pre or post or halfway through laminating.  It would stiffen the blade considerably.  Much easier than trying to shape dihedral into the blade, but maybe not as cool looking.

[NLCHAWAII]

Bill ... ahhh , I get it now . Ya , wings would create a ton of catch ... I wonder how the release of the stroke would be and what flutter issues might present themselves . Soft enough wings might not interfere with the release . I might have to play with that . And by fence , were you referring to a strong dihedral ridge ? Kinda like what Les @ Makana Alii is doing on his new molded OC1 blades ?
   bbqSUPPER ... the pic you posted was of Leleo Kinimakas work . That shape as he describes it acts like fingers in the wave . The extra tip action adds drag which totally works for turns while surfing .
   To those that offered a compliment ... Thank you very much guys , Aloha .
   To Loosehead ... you had asked a question in a PM asking how to attach a blade to a shaft .  Well ...
Cut your shaft to the desired angle and glue on the blade ( straight of course ) with epoxy , PU glue , hot glue or some spit if its sticky enough . Then I'd use a small amount of bondo to create a nice radius where the shaft and blade meet together . Then I'd use a 12oz layer of carbon or two layers of 6 oz or three layers of 4 oz , whatever you got on hand to get at least a 12 oz build up of carbon and create a patch or as I call it , a COLLAR on the bottom of the blade . Once cured and rough edges trimmed and sanded I would use the same amount of carbon on the top of the blade . I allow the top collar to drape around the sides and I'll trim and wrap the upper piece of the top collar around the shaft which covers a bit of the bottom collar . You can use fiberglass , but I'd start with a 16 oz build up of layers as a minimum . This process requires practice , a couple of laminating and molding styles , lots of sanding , trimming and fitting , but when done correctly will give a near failure-less joint . Out of 500 paddles , I've only had two or three fail !
   I used to hand wrap my shafts , ahhh ... the good old days . Heavy lumpy shafts . I then graduated to a Cuisinart icecream maker as a shaft spinner . Slow and noisy , but my shaft quality moved up several notches at that time . Then I visited NASA and bought one of their rigs . Well , uh , maybe I simply  found something on the side of the road and made it suite my needs . I can't really remember , but the point I was getting at was that instead of trying to setup a really trick system for making shafts , I built the bear basics of what I needed and got on with doing the task . At the moment I'm using a Kitchen Aid mixer with that nice square drive head hole thing . Its variable speed and super torquey . I made several bondo , metal , wood attachments to hold and spin all the various shaft mandrels that I work with .
In this foto , I'm using a wide piece of 4 oz glass to start the first course of a red glass shaft .
and in this foto I'm using VCR tape , aka MYLAR TAPE , to compress the glass and epoxy . Tomorrow , after it cures , I can use a heat gun and remove the VCR tape and move on with the process .

[loosehead]

wow you are giving me an education my friend.what do you use as release ageant on the mandrel?  have you ever used carbon sleeves and shrink tubing?anyway thanks for the help and you make awesome product.anytime you are south of the border gimme a shout ,plenty of room at mi casa.muchas gracias amigo

[NLCHAWAII]

Hey Loosehead , as for mandrel mold release ... well I'm using wooden mandrels soaked in oil and a few covered in epoxy . Being wood , they have a shelf life . They end up getting beat up and slowly deform . I haven't had to retire any but may in the future . I used to be able to slide the first laminant off before full cure , but not any more . I have to cut 'em off and glue the seem back together and move on thru the lam process . I like to keep a light coat of 30w motor oil on the mandrel and I use 6" stretchy packing plastic for a release bearier . Spiral wrapping the stuff over a film of oil can create bunching issues when sliding it off .
   As for carbon sleeving as what Solar composites sells , I've been a customer in the past . I really need to be able to pick and choose just what angle the carbon is wrapping around the shaft to suite my needs . The braided sleeving has it's place , but not for my shafts . Yes you CAN make a very nice shaft from sleeving , BUT there is a whole world of options BEYOND that .
   I took a few fotos yesterday of what I was trying to describe in that yellow drawing .
   Pictured is the top collar made of 24K carbon tow hand braided in three directions under a burn layer of 4 oz glass . By burn layer , I mean a layer that is intended to be heavily sanded into to help create a true and level surface .


Then that collar is placed , aligned and trimmed to a closer fit .



   Then I wrap the flaps at the top of the collar past each other and secure them in place with that afore mentioned stretchy packing plastic .
   Then into the V. bag and the oven and cooked at 170 F . for about 20 minutes .
   Those edges from the top collar wrapped nicely around to the bottom and will trim to a clean seem with about 20 seconds of sanding .
   AAAHHHHH vacum bagged goodness . If vacum bagging isn't in your laminating routine , you gotta learn it and use it . At times , it's just an indispensable tool you can't do without .

[DurhamSUP]

What a great thread. I really like your work. Please keep the pictures coming.

If you don't mind, I had a couple questions:
Is that a paper towel used as peel ply?
Would the same process work with all fiberglass?

I have a bunch of scrap class and some glass tape, and figured it would be a fun project to make a spare paddle. I wasn't sure if you would need so much glass to get the same stiffness as carbon that you would have a really heavy paddle.

[loosehead]

you really got it figured out nic.down here in mexico vacum bagging supplies could be hard to come by so i`ll have to wait to return to the states before i try it.when you layer up your tow and glass do you glue it together first to maintain the shape or just lay them on top of each other?thanks again for the foto`s and tips.

[NLCHAWAII]

The motor from a refrigerator works great as a vacum pump . Ethically , when removing the motor from a refrigerator , you should have a professional evacuate the refrigerant gas from the lines so as not to release  the gas into the environment . It was twelve years ago , but I remember the guy charging  me something like 20 bucks to evacuate the lines . The point is that you can have a low CFM pump that pulls nearly a full vacum for dirt cheap . For hoses , I use that ridged refrigerator water supply line hosing . For vacum bags , I use trash bags and tape . I use zip ties to seal the tube going into the bag . On the end of the hose , I'll put a piece of poly breather fabric to keep the bag from sucking into the hose . For peel ply ( the fabric stuff can get kinda spendy ) I use plastic from a trash bag with wholes poked in it and I use paper towel as a breather layer against the peel ply layer . I've had my little main pump running quietly now for about twelve years and it and I have done thousands of vacum bag set ups during that time . Using the expendable supplies that I use , a vac bag session costs me well under .25 cents per pop !

[NLCHAWAII]

   DurhamSUP - it would take alot of glass to equal the stiffness of carbon . In this application , it takes roughly a third more glass than carbon to get the same perceived strength but not stiffness . I say perceived strength because carbon and glass are so different from each other in a designing or engineering stand point .
   Loosehead - I tape a piece of plastic on a flat scrape of plywood and lay my carbon / glass / epoxy over that disposable layer of plastic . Then I'll add another layer of plastic on top , draw cut lines from a template and cut out nice clean lines from what would previously be impossible to do without the plastic . I'll then remove the bottom layer of plastic and add my now wetted out and cut to shape carbon to what ever it is that I'm building , then align , trim and in some cases then remove the top plastic and move on in the process .

[karl]

Great stuff!

Do you vary the the size and shape of the carbon collars to get the flex you want in the blade?

And do you vary the glass lay up on the blade for flex too?

I've gone down a different route for my first carbon paddle. Using XPS to make an angled spline that goes from paddle into carbon pole, vaccuumed with carbon fibre - I'll post some pictures when I get further along. I can see your method is much quicker.

Karl

[NLCHAWAII]

Karl - I generally stick to a certain size collar and glassing over a blade . It's been my stock , goto , baseline that I start with . If I need more or less stiffness in a blade - My first response is to change the thickness of the core wood that I'm using . My next option is how much carbon tow I'll add to both sides of the blade . For surf blades I'll add five strands of 12K tow per blade side and generally for race blades , I'll add seven 12K strands of tow per side . That , my collars and two layers of 4 oz glass per side has been suiting me well for a while now . I look forward to seeing your project . Get those picks posted when you can .

[blueplanetsurf]

Thanks for sharing some of your "secrets".  Alex does some really amazing work in his little workshop.  I have been using NLC paddles for about 2 years now and they are amazing.
There are a couple of videos about the Native Living Custums paddles on this post:
http://zenwaterman.blogspot.com/2012/05/2012-sup-paddle-reviews-by-robert.html

[PonoBill]

Have you tried using ripstop nylon for peel ply? works well and you can even reuse it sometimes. Oil absorber diapers work well for the absorbent layer. I suspect they pick up more epoxy than the paper towels do.

You might want to consider fabricating ferrules for your shaft/blade joint, Then you can hot glue the shaft to the blade and be able to repair damage or swap blades.