I love making boards and the board making step I love the most is shaping the rails on a surfboard. This is the step that takes it from a block of foam to something that really feels like a board.
To kick things off, we mark where we are going to shape the board. First off, we mark the sides. For the X6, we’re going to go with a 60-40-ish split which puts us about an inch down from the deck. After marking the sides, we’re going to mark the deck bands. Typically we’ll mark two bands but depending on the shape you want you can go for whatever you need. For the X6 we’re going as knifey as we can so our first band is around 2 inches from the edge and the second band is about 4 inches from the edge. This board is a little wide so I’ll still have plenty of flat space on the deck for my enormous feet.
The tool I’m using in the pic is a marking gauge from Foam E-Z. You can easily make something like this on your own and often you’ll see folks using a piece of foam that they’ve stabbed a pencil through. I picked this up as an impulse buy and it’s been handy.
After everything is marked out, I like to start with the bottom tuck. This is using the Rail Runner tool we had seen in other steps which doubles as a Fred tool. The second half of this video from Greenlight surf supply will show you how to do it. Count the number of times you run it across the bottom of the rail and make sure you do it the same number of times on both sides.
Fred tool 
Bottom tuck
This time around, I tried putting a 2×4 across the board to use as a hard stop to make sure I wasn’t going too far back on the tail and that the tuck was symmetrical around two sides. It worked nicely but is maybe a little overkill.
Once the bottom tuck is in, we use various surform tools to shape the material on the deck from the first band to the mark on the side.
Once the side mark and the first band is connected, mark another line at the midpoint between the first band mark and the side mark.
Now we connect the second band to the midpoint to finish up the deck. From here we will smooth it out with 100 grit sandpaper. I like to wrap it around a sponge for support. At this point I’ll turn on the side lights to make sure it’s even and will round out the nose.
Smoothing it out with sandpaper 
Smoothed out
The last step is to smooth and round out the rails with dragon skin. It’s kind of a goofy name for what is essentially a large sheet of drywall screen but we’re all having fun here!
For this step, we put the board in the racks on its side and run the dragon skin over the area we shaped on the rails being careful not to hit the tail area that we left square. Again, count the number of passes and make sure to do the same number on both sides.
Because this board is really light, I tried putting some bungees around the racks and on the stringer to help hold it in place. It helped keep it from slipping. I’m thinking next time I might fashion a sling and use something less elastic to hold the board in place.