4/2/2023 0 Comments Aku shaper fishtail![]() ![]() The proven vehicle for this stage of the process is the Template. Your basic template is a full length rendering of the board’s outline, divided in half lengthwise. This is laid onto the blank down the centre and traced, then flipped and repeated on the other side to ensure symmetry (if that’s what the shaper is aiming for). In the “olden days” before the advent of computer aided design, shapers relied on some more analogue methods for creating their templates – bending and tracing flexible batons into aesthetically pleasing curves, combining existing templates to form new shapes, and others that I won’t go into detail about here. These days it’s much more likely that the design process starts on a computer screen and in many cases it doesn’t venture beyond the digital realm until the machine-shaped blank is ready for cleaning up.īut that’s not what I’m going to talk about here. What I’m going to detail here is my process for creating a template. Feel free to cherry-pick any bits that you find useful.ġ. Designing the outline: So far all the boards I’ve built have been unique, one-off shapes. They start in my head as an idea of the board I’d like to create – e.g. a 5’10” quad fish with a beaked nose and single to double concave bottom contours. I’ll then sit down with my laptop and, using a free board shaping application downloaded from the internets, I’ll set about conceptualising the outline, rocker curves and foil of the board. To date I’ve used two different programs for this process. The free trial version of Aku Shaper is the one I’ve used mostly. It takes a bit of playing around to get used to the controls, but it’s pretty intuitive. The downside is that with the free version, you can’t save your shapes. However, I’ve developed a workaround for this, which I’ll detail at a later point in this post. The other application I’ve recently started playing around with is Shape3D, on the advice of local shaping legend Leighton Clark, whose shaping machine runs on files created through this program. I also use the free FinFoil application to muck about with fin designs, but that’s another story for another day.Ģ.īecause I haven’t done enough playing yet to go into too much detail about Shape3D, for now I’ll stick to Aku Shaper. Saving all the critical measurements: Once I have an outline and rocker profile I’m happy with in Aku Shaper, I take screenshots of all the important points and their measurements – 1’ from tail and nose, wide point, nose & tail rocker etc. I use a Mac, so to take a screenshot I use the Shift+Command+4 shortcut then, using the mouse, I highlight the area I want to snap. This saves a screenshot in jpg format to the desktop, which I then go back and rename. To consolidate all these images into a single file, I export them to PDF then, selecting one file to be the master, I click & drag thumbnails of all the others into this file (Google search how to combine PDF files using Preview for more information on this process). ![]()
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