Building a Wooden Paddleboard

I recently wrapped up building two wooden SUPs (stand up paddle board) and this project was a blast. It started with a kit from Jarvis Boards.

The first trip on the water was magical!

Part of the fun was figuring out how I wanted the boards to look. I went with cedar, curly maple, mahogany and bloodwood and ripped all the strips myself. The nose and tail blocks on one board are lacewood, black limba on the other. The combo made for amazing color contrast.

The colors really popped.

Like building a cedar strip canoe the forms from Jarvis create the shape. They've got a bunch of different designs available. Mine are 11'-4" long and about 30" at their widest. The decals were made from rice paper. This is a cool trick. I printed my image on the rice paper using a standard laser printer. The rice paper goes on the board after the penetrating epoxy and under the fiberglass matt. Once the paper is wet with epoxy all you see is the printed image.

The curves are gentle enough that I didn't have to bevel the edges of the strips. So, each strip gets glued to the form and to the adjacent strip with Titebond III. After the glue is dry the boards are hand planed and sanded (a lot of sanding) and then get a coat of TotalBoat Penetrating Epoxy, a few coats of TotalBoat High Performance Epoxy along with a fiberglass matt, and 6 coats of TotalBoat Gleam Varnish.

Jarvis figures there's about 40 hours per board in the build. It's hard for me to confirm since I was shooting video throughout the process, which adds a ton of time. You can watch the build video on WWGOA. Kit plus material was about $600 per board. That's a bargain when you look at the price of wooden SUPs.

This was a labor-intensive project, but fun to do. It consumed quite a bit of space in my shop and you need to have an epoxy-friendly environment when you get to that step. You don't need to be an expert woodworker to build an SUP with these kits, but should be comfortable with general tool use. Gluing the strips on in clamp-intensive, but Jarvis has tips that'll help you with clamping workarounds. Jarvis also has a bunch of great how-to videos so, even if you've never done this before, you'll be able to get through the build.

I'd do this again, but maybe not for a while. :) Now we just need warm weather so we can take advantage of our cool new SUPs.