Hi all,

Just got back from a great week of surfing on a vanguard style sup I built a couple of years ago and am starting to plan a new build. I just wanted to float some ideas around and se if anyone thinks this is either a good or bad idea and maybe work through a few problems.

So anyway after reading mountains of stuff on swaylocks here etc I can't stop thinking about building a board using the lamination techniques used in kiteboard manufacture.

So the plan would a be: build the main part of the board as a thinnish core of some kind of HD foam (12mm?) With top and bottom skins vac bagged onto it. Add hard rails into this as per what they do on kiteboards. So then I would have a hopefully stiff 7 ft vanguard style outline with no flotation, but also can't suck water into EPs core.

Then shape up flotation/deck part of board out of HD xps as per a softbard and glue onto the giant kiteboard section.
Route in plugs to finish.

Has anyone tried this kind of thing? I have plenty of epoxy, vac gear etc, but unsure of;

How thich do you reckon the core of the kiteboard section should be to give it enough stiffness?
What core material would be worth using?
Where do you get hold of foam like they use in softboards?

Happy for this to be a total experiment, I just keep imagining the thing snapping in half because the structural core would be so thin compared with traditional construction.

I have no probs with hard rails all the way round with this type of construction.

Any help would be much appreciated, think I'll start this instead of cutting the deck hump out of my ace.

Cheers chris