The Oh Bey Bee is another experiment using XPS insulation foam from the local hardware store. After making the X6, I felt that I really needed more nose rocker. So the big experiment with this board was to glue a block of foam on the front part of the board to give it some space for the nose.
In addition to more nose rocker, I decided to give the board some length by taking the nose to a point and giving it a rounded tail. I also committed to a thruster fin configuration. My goal is to develop a board tailored for Double Bluff instead of my usual Jetty ride.
Specs
- Designation: BPX7 – Oh Bey Bee!
- Length: 6′
- Width: 19 1/2″
- Thickness: 1 7/8″
- Core: XPS Foam
- Deck Glass:
- 4oz S Glass
- 6oz Warp Glass
- Bottom Glass:
- 4oz S Glass
- 6oz Warp Glass
- Resin: Resin Research 2000 CE Ultra Epoxy
- Hardener: Resin Research 2100S Slow Hardener
- Paint:
- Acrylic airbrushed on foam
- Soundtrack Highlight:
- The Clash – London Calling
Building The Board
Note: I did a step by step guide with the X6. For this board, I’m only going to focus on notes that make it different.
The X5 and the X6 were made from 2′ x 8′ pieces of insulation foam that I picked up at Lowe’s for between $20 – $25. Since 6′ is big for a kiteboard, I’m left with a 2′ square piece. For this board, I decided to glue that piece on the nose so I could get some more nose rocker.
From here, things progressed as normal. I built hot wire guides, glued in the stringer, hot wire cut the foam to the guides to create the blank. I built nose and tail templates. Cut the blank to the template.
Oh yeah, remember that time when I accidentally glued the blank to the table? Well, this time around I used masking paper to prevent that.
Alright, everything is going swell until the right side of the nose block came apart.
To fix this side, I use a five minute epoxy. This glued it down fine but created another problem. The cured epoxy is MUCH harder than the foam. This made shaping this area very difficult any sanding in the area will take down all the surrounding area much faster than the epoxy.
As luck would have it, I got the chance to try again. After shaping the rails, the other side came apart. It appears that regular Gorilla Glue doesn’t work so well to glue foam together. For the left side of the nose, I tried the Clear Gorilla Glue which doesn’t foam.
And now the other side 
Clear Gorilla Glue to the rescue
The clear glue glued it down just fine and was easier to work with. The glue layer is still harder than the surrounding foam but it’s easier to sand than the epoxy.
Alright, so things seem to be going well. The nose is fixed, the rails are shaped, the fin box slots are routed and the board is sealed. I’m feeling pretty good. I give it a coat of paint when my friend Derek asks if I could send a pic of the progress. I send him this:
His response is, “Dude, nice concave rails”. I’m like “yeah bruh” and then I stare at the picture, and I stare at the board, and I stare at the picture and the board. Then I take the board back to shed and start measuring, mostly because I want to believe that I’m not seeing what I’m seeing. Yep, there’s a wave in the rail.
A long story short, my 20″ wide board is now a 19 1/2″ board as I completely reshaped the rails. It’s harder to reshape rails than it is to shape them the first time but I probably spent more time staring in horror at the board than it took to redo it. Chalk it up as another learning experience.
Alright, back to the garage for painting. To go with my pun of a name, the Oh Bey Bee!, I decided this board needed to be a bee. I debated whether to go cartoony or realistic-ish and settled on realistic-ish. It turned out to be a bit more difficult to make the bee look fuzzy but I was pretty happy with the result. The weekend I was painting the board was the weekend that the news broke that the US has been invaded by Murder Hornets. It was a bad time to have a 6′ long image of a bee. There may have been a few panic attacks from unsuspecting family members wandering into the garage.
Glassing the nose on this board was a little tricky but I probably had my worst results around the edge of the tail. There were a few spots that needed patching. That said, this was probably my best glass job yet. One thing that highlighted was the need to get the cut lap ridge flush with the foam. There were quite a few areas where the tension of the cloth pulled up and left air bubbles around the ridge. Most of these were small and didn’t seem to be delaminated but I did have to dremel out one area and patch it up.
Because the art on this one took up the entire bottom, I decided to put the name and haiku for the board on the deck. After glassing the deck, I was sitting on the back porch with my wife drinking a beer when I realized that the change to my process caused me to forget the text. So I added glass patches to the deck before hotcoating. Yet another unintended opportunity to try something new.
To fill the few areas the glass bubbled or delaminated, I made a paste of epoxy and microballoons. Something new I tried this time around was to mix in acrylic paint to get the color closer to the underlying blue color. This worked out well however since the microballoons make the paste white, I would have needed a darker shade of blue to lighten up. For the black, I used epoxy pigment that I had on hand.
After sanding and polishing the board up, I put on the traction pad. I thought I was done but as I was installing fins, one of my fins would not go in. That’s when I noticed that my tape had leaked and the fin box had a layer of epoxy in the bottom. I very carefully knocked that out with a hammer and a screwdriver.
This board was definitely a challenge but it’s the things that go wrong that offer the biggest opportunities to learn.
The Ride
The Kev Bomb was finished during the COVID-19 quarantine and the Oh Bey Bee! was made during it as well. I don’t like to start on a new board without riding the last one I made but the universe had other plans for me this year. As a result, I had two boards to ride once my local beach re-opened. In riding the Kev Bomb, I was thinking about all the things I would change. The next day I took the Oh Bey Bee! out and realized I had made all those changes with this board. The long, knifey, parallel rails help this board rip upwind. It has a pointed nose with enough rocker to cut through the chop and small waves at Jetty Island. The rounded tail and thruster configuration gave it some decent maneuverability. Overall this board was a ton of fun and is likely going to become my main ride for a while.
About Dennis Bey
The “Oh Bey Bee!” is named after my friend Dennis Bey. Dennis is always outside. If he’s not kiteboarding, he’s snowboarding, hiking or doing something in the fresh air.
I have shared more sessions than I can count with Dennis. He and Kevin Reilly encouraged me to stick with kiteboarding on the day I was ready to quit. One Day at Double Bluff, they both grabbed me and pulled me back to Earth when I started to float away in 30+ kts on my 10.
But what I especially give Dennis credit for is getting me on my surfboard. My family had given me one as a birthday gift. I had taken it to the beach several times but hadn’t ridden it because I was intimidated to go strapless. Dennis asked me to borrow it. He had never ridden a surfboard until that time but he took to it right away. He pushed me to give it a shot, so I did. I was blown away at how natural it felt and have barely ridden strapped since. That day unlocked a love within a love! See kids, peer pressure is a good thing!