Lacewood Dagger - Long Board
Even though I ended up incorporating this board into a bookshelf, the Dagger was intended to be ridden as a down hill board. Wheel well cut outs, aerodynamic profile (at least aesthetically aerodynamic) and a little extra thickness for a stiff ride, this board would handle speed with ease.
Required Resources: 7 hours, $45
Size: 9" x 32" x 0.7"
Materials: Lacewood, Walnut, Wenge, Purpleheart, Titebond I glue
Finish: Natural Colored Stain, 3 Coats Semi-Gloss Polyurethane Aerosol
Tools: Table Saw, Planer, Jointer, Router with 0.5" round over bit, Random Orbital Sander.
New Techniques:
Experiments in Lacewood - I'll admit, I'd worked with Lacewood (the reddish wood with the pronounced rays) on one other occasion; it did not go well. It was in the Salmon Spreader project and I used Lacewood as the cladding for the salmon blade. The rays of the wood looked like scales; aesthetically it made sense. I did not realize how inelastic lacewood is, however, and ended up splitting the wood while inserting handle pins, after the cladding had been glued to the blade. After that it took me another 3 years to actually get up the "courage" to work with lacewood again (aside from being brittle, lacewood dust is an irritant and can cause some respiratory problems). I was careful with the glue up and used smooth curves in the board profile to avoid any stress concentrations that might be the provenance of a propagating crack.
Lessons Learned:
Thick Boards are Heavy Boards: I left this board ~40% thicker than my normal board. I wanted a little extra strength. Unsurprisingly, this board ended up %40 heavier than the other boards I made. Being as heavy as it was, this would not make a very good commuter board. To make it more suitable for commuting, I could have planed it down to the standard 0.5" and it still would have been plenty strong. Alternatively, I could have planed it down to 0.375" and then fiber glassed both faces.
