Hello there!
My friend, Kuba, and I (my name is Wojtek, nice to meet you!) are building our first ever kiteboard. We have about 4 years of experience in building longboards, our work had many ups and downs during this time but we've gained a lot of precious knowledge on working with plywood and fiberglass. That's why we decided to build our own board and to use plywood for this purpose.
We rejected the idea of building a board of paulownia or balsa wood because it is quite difficult to get it here in Poland. We also wanted to try something stronger than foam board. We suspect that a plywood board might be kinda heavy but we hope that, when nicely tapered, it will work fine and be just light enough. Please, follow us on our jurney through the world of building kiteboards.
If you have any ideas, pieces of advice or you'd just like to share your opinion on this project, feel free to post a comment below!
Stage 1 - building a rocker table
We designed the board to have about 6cm of continuous rocker. To build the ribs we used some old pieces of particleboard that were laying around in my garage. After cutting all the straight edges on a table saw, we roughly cut the shape of the rocker using a jig saw. Then we used a more precisely cut piece of plywood with the shape of our rocker, we screwed it to each of the ribs and using a router mounted under the table we copied the shape from the plywood template to each of the particleboard ribs. The result was quite satisfactory. The top surface is a piece of hardboard (?); basically a very fine particleboard (don't know the exact name in English). The result of stage 1 looks as follows (the middle ribs are yet to be screwed, the same with the surface piece):