Escape to The Rescue

These are the first images of the raw blank straight from the machine at Homeblown, got to say I'm pretty chuffed with the way that it looks. Tris told me that he glued three blocks of foam together and then hot-wired the basic blank prior to having the shaping machine deal with Dwights numbers for the final shape. 

On the Machine 

Rail Line and Nose Rocker

Bottom

 I love the look of this bottom profile - it looks like a porky version of my Naish and there is something comforting about the width of the tail. Above all though to me it looks like a proper job surfboard.

Top

Ok - to sum up the story so far is -

I have a 129litres of surfboard shaped foam all ready to rock and roll.

A big, fat resounding N.F.I. from  three local shapers, one of whom  I had hoped might be vaguely interested in hand finishing the blank, and slinging a couple of layers of epoxy drenched six ounce glass on the bottom and three layers on the top.

And an increasing feeling that I was going to need a crash course in glass lamination and epoxy resin.

The prospect of having to do the glassing myself was looming large, there was no way that I could pull this off without help so I called Andru to see if he fancied re-awakening his board manufacturing skills.

'I could probably get the loan of a shaping shack' he said, 'and I'm pretty happy to stand over you whilst you screw things up'.

Well it was a back up plane least.  Then Tris who could obviously feel my pain mentioned that he was about to travel up to a customer of his in Wadebridge, who not only had experience in epoxy but also with StandUps.  That customer was Bill of  Escape Surfboards.  He suggested that I gave Bill a call. So I did, and you know what? The guy was so easy to talk to, he was interested in my project, his first comment was -

'Yep we can do that'

His second was

'No problem'

and his third was

'Give me an email of exactly what you want and I'll give you a price.'

So I did - glass it as you see fit, twin leash plugs on the tail, twin plugs in the deck to use the paddle as a carrying handle, (no balance issues with this one) and a leash plug and FCS plug in the nose for a GoPro mount. Paint the bottom with a Cornish Flag and you know what - he emailed me back within 24hours with a price. Happy with that I thought and off we go again.

I was gobsmacked - apart from being an easy going guy that made me feel like a customer and not a pain in the ass, Bill had pretty much single handedly restored my faith in  custom shapers, and he hadn't yet seen the blank.  Top bloke.

So there we go at the moment the blanks with Escape being hand finished prior to glassing and fitting out. Can't wait.