Telephone: 01872 553918
Laminations Surfboards Cornwall
Unit 3, Wheal kitty, St Agnes TR5 0RD
Unit 3, Wheal kitty, St Agnes TR5 0RD
Here at Laminations we use a CNC surfboard shaping machine that is designed specifically to shape surfboards. This machine means we can custom shape a surfboard in approximately 25 - 30 minutes, reproduce accurate shapes time after time and store designs on file for customers and surfers to come back to at any time.
It was developed by Miki Langenbach, a German gentleman living on the Gold Coast, Australia. Miki's educational background is in engineering but after years of sailboard building, hand shaping 10ft + sail boards that are 5 inch's thick, Miki's attention turned to constructing profiling devices to do most of the shaping "hard work".
'... Finally I could do what I wanted, design a surfboard like a shaper without special computer skills, tweak the surfboard a bit here and there, position the design on screen into the blank of choice and press the button. With this development the machine grew from strength to strength. In July 2003 i machine shaped 20 surfboards, in August 2003 i shaped 50 surfboards, half a year later the machine had a history of over 4000 surfboards. Not bad for a little single cutter shaping machine originally designed as a shapers tool to make a few surfboards a day...' - Miki Langenbach
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The first stage to shaping your new custom built surfboard is to design the board using our new state of the art shaping program SHAPE 3D. We first input the measurements for the surfboard, length, width and thickness so that the screen allows us to see (in 3D) the plan shape of the board. We are then able to adjust any measurement (rocker, thickness, tail shape etc) with pin point accuracy to give the customer exactly what they want. |
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When we are happy with the shape of the surfboard a blank is chosen. The foam blank is placed exactly in the centre of the machine bed with the aid of a infrared laser.
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The cutting head on the APS3000 is an inverted sanding disc on which the only movement is to the side and vertically. The bed of the machine which is holding the blank has the forward and back (nose to tail) movement. The shaping machine begins at the nose of the surfboard and slowly cuts along the stringer towards the tail.
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As you can see in this image the cutting head has made its way across the deck of the surfboard blank and has completed one rail.
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With the deck of the surfboard cut you can see the finished article taking shape with amazing accuracy.
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The surfboard blank is then turned over, realigned with the laser and the process begins again.
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The cut surfboard blanks come from the machine and are finished by hand. This accentuates the fact that this is a Custom surfboard shaping machine, the shaper is 100% in control of their surfboard design from start to finish.
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Stage one of the hand finish is a quality control check to ensure that the machine has done it's job accurately. Here Loggins has a quick look at the surfboards plan shape.
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In this shot the rails are being shaped/refined with a gauze.
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Here Loggins is smoothing down the cut lines left from the machine and at this point he has to start to shape in the concaves, vee or flat bottom.
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The majority of shaping time is spent carefully adjusting the shape on the underside of the surfboard and especially the transition from the bottom and around the rails.
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There are many subtle contours that can be shaped into the board...... Vee, spiral vees, reverse vee, single concaves, double concaves, .... I could go on but i think you get the point. Every room in a surfboard factory needs a well trained craftsman looking after it.
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