Building Nina's Wing Board

It's been about 40 years since I last built a windsurfing board. That was tons of fun (and made relatively easy because the University of Konstanz offered a course, where they provided a room, ordered supplies, and gave some instruction) - so why not do it again?

Nina wanted to try a smaller wing board, since many wingers say smaller is better. Normally, we'd probably just take a trip to a place where you can rent a few, but this is not the best time for traveling. So - just getting a blank, putting tracks in,  and wrapping it in fiber glass can't be too expensive, right? Especially since Nina wants a tiny board - only about 160 cm long. No need for a mast track of foot strap plugs, either!

We priced it out the easy and "perfect" way - a pre-cut, custom designed blank shipped to our door, S-glass and carbon, and a few other goodies. That came out to about $900 for material. Too much!

Back to the drawing board. Insulation foam from the local hardware store, cheaper fiber glass, no carbon, and a few more simplifications dropped the price to about $350. Sounds much better! 

Once we had discussed this, Nina asked about once per hour "when are we going to the hardware store"? So we got started, and three days later, her board came into existence:

It's in there! I just have to cut it out, put foil tracks in, and wrap it up in some fiber glass. Granted, I work on a computer and not with my hands, so this will be slow going, but there's a reasonable chance this will get done before next year. If the little boss does not make me work too hard on this, I'll keep you posted about the progress here, and share some details about what I did, and what I learned.

Material

2 inch x 4 feet x 8 ft insulation board (2)

Electric foam cutter (and old socks to clean it while cutting)

Gorilla glue, 8 oz bottle

Lots of weights, clamps, and wood

Lessons 

• Check the foam carefully in the store. The pieces I used had a shallow groove on one side that I had not seen, which required a "Gorilla glue injection" after the first glueing
• Clamps work better than weights. We tried weights for the first two pieces we put together, but even a couple of hundred pounds is nothing to expanding Gorilla glue. In the picture, the third piece that allows for decent nose rocker is glued on, and the clamps help things together much better. A few more pieces of wood to also compress the middle might have been useful.