I called them Shed Shapes because they were crafted in the
true spirit of the backyard shaper and the longest run of my shaping and
glassing days was all conducted in a 6x8 foot shed out in my back yard.
Because of the limitations of this small space, and for the
better part of 20 years, I wasn’t able to make a board any longer than eight
foot. It didn’t matter so much because at the time, I held nothing but disdain
for longboards and longboard surfers. As
my area was overrun with them in the 90’s, I considered them lame and only
tools for kooks and old, out of shape has beens. Of course, as I aged and devolved into a has
been myself, I did eventually give in and build an eight foot mini-mal. To get the blank, and then the finished board,
into and out of my “shop” I had to lift the nose up into the elevated gambrel roof,
and dip the tail down to the floor and pivot it through the door. The tip of the nose and tail actually fit in between
two studs and kissed the wood of the exterior siding and it was a bit of a challenge
to glass the finished shape. But like
all the other boards I’d made over the years, I improvised, adapted, and
overcame my limitations.
I started surfing in 1974 and shaped my first board in 1975 in
the detached garage of the summer cottage my family rented each July &
August. There were no local shapers with
whom to apprentice, nor was there any internet or Swaylocks or other mentors to
show me the ropes back then. Not in
Maine for sure. I learned the process,
start to finish, all from what I could glean from a blue paperback entitled:
Surfboard Design And Construction, authored by James Kinstle and published by:
Natural High Express Publishing Company.
I’d found this early board building bible in an issue of Surfer magazine
and mail ordered my copy and waited with eager anticipation for the 6-8 weeks
delivery. I still have it, complete with
tattered pages and resin stains; it’s probably a collector’s item now. And though I made many mistakes on that first
board, a blue, 7 foot pintail, orange finned gun, including mistakenly
laminating the board with gloss resin and glossing with laminating resin (went
through about a ream of sandpaper trying to sand that gummy resined board!) I
was pretty stoked with my first effort.
Mom was less stoked with the mess I made, especially the resin splatters
on the wood floor of that old garage that I’m sure remain there 39 years later!
Over the ensuing years, in other garages, basements,
outdoors under the shade of trees, and of course in that little shed, I
continued to develop my “craft.” For me
it was mostly a matter of economics; I found then, and still today, that I
could roughly build two boards for the price of one off the racks in a surf
shop. If I lived in an area where blanks
were more readily accessible, I could have bettered that ratio but what always
got me was the shipping of blanks from places like Florida, California, and
Washington state, to my little corner of the surfing globe in Maine.
I’m the first to admit I am no craftsperson. My “technique,” based mostly on a lot of
trial and error, would make professional board builders cringe I’m sure. It wasn’t until Swaylocks came along in
recent times that I “discovered” how to perform most of the little “tricks of
the trade.” But I’ve developed my own
process and while slow and crude, I’m able to produce boards that work. Shaping has always come a bit easier to me,
not because I’m masterful with tools, which I am most certainly not, but
because I have a pretty good eye, and I’m not afraid of sweat and blood. And after 40 years of surfing almost every
shape (many of them dogs that I made!) I’d like to believe I know which designs
are valid. Actually, I have an almost
curmudgeonly, “Parmenteresque,” (Dave Parmenter, my board design hero) type cynicism
and am quite bored with most of modern equipment (and contest driven surfing
for that matter!) I find a lot of what
is out there today is either gimmicky, or at the other end of the spectrum,
refinement of the same old stale “tri-fin” design to the point of fetid
stagnation. I grew up on single fins and
to me, that’s the foundation every surfer should build on, learning to surf the
wave rather than the board, which single fins force you to do. That is not to say that other designs aren’t,
or can’t be valid, only that like most everything else these days, kids want to
learn how to dunk before they can dribble, juggle before they can execute a
basic inside of the foot pass, or boost air before they can put a board on rail
off the bottom.
Glassing has always been my nemesis when it comes to board
building. There are so many technical
aspects to the process that only years and hundreds of boards glassed can
master. And as I’m often strapped for
finances, and only make a handful of boards each year, for either myself or a
few friends, it’s taken me decades to reach even a base level of proficiency. But there’s something to be said for learning
things the hard way. You haven’t lived
until you’ve watched a batch go off in the bucket when you’ve still only
saturated half the glass on the board with resin. Or tried to sand a board mistakenly hot
coated with lam resin…
Many of my early boards were “stripped down” shapes. These are either old boards, or boards that
just didn’t work, that I stripped off the glass and re-shaped into something
new, sometimes even using cheaper, boat yard resin, in all its brownish, root
beer tinted ugliness. I still do this
today sometimes and call the reconstituted shapes my: “Frankenboards” (I even
have a logo of a frankensteinian monster riding a taped and stitched board!) Sometimes I get ideas for prototypes and test
it out this way; one of my current boards is an asymmetrical board that
originally started as a high performance longboard; morphed to a “cut a foot off
the nose” fun shape; to strip the glass and reshape a 7’6” flat rockered, bevel
railed mush buster; to cut six more inches off and reshape to swallow tail; to
cut off one swallow and reshape more kick in the tail on the backside rail,
along with moving the sidebite (2+1 finset) on that side up for a more forward
pivot point, flex finned, flat rockered, flyer!
This board looks weird and every bit as cobbled together parts as did
Frankenstein’s monster, but it goes really, really fast on the forehand, and is
a bit looser on the backhand and works…for me!
I call it the Platypus model cuz its flat blunt nose looks like the bill
of a platypus and platypuses (platypusi?) look like a collection of used animal
parts as well.
After all these years, and meagerly improved technique, I’ve
reached a point with my board building that I’m pretty confident of turning out
good boards that work, though I’m still working on the cosmetic end of
glassing. Trying my hand at tints and
resin pinlines, like they used to do in the 70’s, makes me appreciate that much
more the level of craftsmanship of the old masters.
I made two personal boards this boards this summer: an old
school log, with a glassed on fin and noooo leash plug (riding a longboard with
a leash, to me, is like boosting air at a long pointbreak…and blowing the wave;
fugly!) and a 7’6” hybrid shape that was designed to work in nearly all
conditions. The log performed exactly as
I designed it and I was able to ride it just how I wanted. Very first wave, I pivoted off the bottom and
cross-stepped right up to the nose, before backpedaling into a drop-knee
cutback, some high line trim, and then finishing the wave with an actual
kick-out (remember when surfers ended their rides in this elegant
fashion?) The hybrid on the other hand,
is a, “jury-still-out” affair. Not a fan
of “high-performance” longboarding (to me, shortboard maneuvers on longboards,
with two feet of superfluous nose are not aesthetically pleasing) my intention
was to make a wide, stable board that could still execute high performance
moves while more readily catching and trimming along the mushier breaks I often
have to surf in my area. But like any
compromise design, it doesn’t seem to work so well at either end of the
spectrum and in the end is exactly that, a compromise. Of course, compromise is sometimes the best
solution to certain situations so this board remains in my quiver for now.
I’ve not purchased a board off the racks or ridden any other
shape that I didn’t build myself since 1982.
I’ve lost track of how many boards I’ve built but every one of them was
crafted with the stoke and anticipation of riding something that germinated inside
my own head. I’ve made a fair number of
boards for others in all that time as well, but I do it only on the side and
more to fund my own projects rather than any kind of income producing
endeavor. I am proud that most of the
feedback I’ve received from my “customers” is positive; I attribute this mostly
to knowing what works in the conditions of my region, and considering the skill
level and experience of the people I’ve shaped for. I’ve certainly not made a name for myself in
all these years, though this past summer I did get photographed and interviewed
for Eastern Surf magazine. Sadly, I didn’t
make the cut for the feature on east coast shapers, pros and backyarders like
myself, but then, that was never my motivation for building my own equipment
anyway.
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