Planer board question

[Graham W]

Attached are three photos of a wooden planer board, which must be nearly 50 years old.  It is towed off the back of a slowly-moving boat and a lure is attached to the back of the board on 2m of nylon when trolling for mackerel and bass.  Inverted, it pulls the lure down deep (with three different settings for different depths) and as soon as you have hooked a fish, it automatically flips back to the surface.  It appears to be made of 8mm softwood, 5cm wide and 16cm long.

Back in the day, these were used all the time by boat anglers off the North Devon coast but there are now all kinds of plastic variants that don't work nearly as well.  It was thought to be "fiendishly cunning", which is how it got a casually racist name and which I won't quote.

The question is, how was it made in big numbers and what sort of woodworker would be able to make it today?  The curve at the front appears to have been cut rather than steam bent.  How would that have been achieved quickly and cheaply 50 years ago?

It's too late now for the 2016 mackerel season but I want to stock up with some new boards for next year.  This is my last one and I daredn't use it in case I break or lose it.

[Edwin Davies 2]

Could be cut from a block with a band saw?

[Graham W]

Edwin,

According to an expert woodworking friend of mine (he does it for living), it was almost certainly made from a solid block of wood but shaped with something called a spindle moulding machine.  I hadn't heard of one of these before but apparently it uses a template of the piece to be fabricated and then duplicates it with a spinning plane/blade thingy.  I'm going to his workshop this afternoon.

[Graham W]

Edwin,

You were absolutely right - it can be made with a bandsaw with a narrow blade, as the attached photo of a new planer board made this afternoon shows.  My friend says that it could also be made with a spindle moulding machine but that would give a degree of precision that is not necessary.  Mind you, I wouldn't want to use a bandsaw myself - I think I would end up minus fingers.

The pine that this new piece was made from has an interesting story.  Some very closely-grained pine was needed to match existing cabinetry but was proving very hard to find.  The original items were made from wood sourced from very slow-growing trees in the far north.  Eventually, a batch originating in the Austrian Alps was tracked down to Pennsylvania and shipped back to the UK.  However, it still wasn't close-grained enough and is now lying about the workshop, ready to be turned into things like planer boards.