Danny Hess, at his shop in 2012. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

“Shapers don’t make surfboards to get rich, they do it because they love it,” says San Francisco shaper Danny Hess.

In many cases, a friendship develops between a surfer and a shaper, who in many cases deliver something better than the surfer wanted. Such was the case when local San Francisco surfer Ian Wallace asked Lyle Carlson to replicate the 11-foot big-wave board he’d snapped. Carlson decided Wallace would be better off with a board 11 feet, 6 inches tall and, without even talking to Wallace about it, built one.

“It turned out to be the best board ever,” Wallace said. “Sometimes the board you need is not the board you asked for.”

It’s the loss of relationship that’s troubling when it comes to factory built boards. Surfing is built upon relationships, which form a community. Purists will tell you that by removing craftsmen from that community, surfing loses some of its heart.

One company trying to balance the line between creating a high-quality factory board and still giving surfers a customized experience is Firewire.

The company, which has been around since 2005, started with factories in California and Australia, but moved to Thailand in 2007. Firewire uses expanded polystyrene, which is lighter, tougher, and better for the environment. And because they’re designed with CAD and made with CNC machines, every board is identical.

“We’ve created a technology that’s created an opportunity for someone to buy a surfboard that has very little variances in the design,” Chuy Reyna of Firewire told Wired.

Firewire offers boards designed by a pair of well-known shapers, Tomo (Daniel Thomson) and Gary Linden. And they’re ridden by pros like Bruce Campbell, Noah Erikson, Casey Grant and teen-age wunderkind Sebastian Williams. Pros appreciate the cookie-cutter approach because they can quickly and easily get an exact copy of their favorite board when it inevitably snaps — which is important when you consider top-level pros might go through 150 boards a year.

With more boards being imported from foreign firms who employ people who may have never surfed, many surfers are decrying the commoditization of the sport. Reyna realizes not everyone is keen on a surfboard shaped by machines, but says the technology offers distinct advantages.

“We’re not a surfboard for everybody,” he says. “If you’re serious about equipment, you’ll notice variables in a hand-shaped surfboard. At the end of the day, if you’re competing or just want to replace the board you’re in love with, Firewire is the place where you can get it done.”

While Linden and other shapers see factory boards as a natural evolution of the sport, one born of the global economy and rising popularity of surfing, they aren’t terribly worried about losing their jobs. Factory boards are great for beginners, or pros who need a steady supply of bespoke boards. But stick with the sport long enough, they say, and eventually you’ll want a custom board.

“People hunger for and have an appreciation for something that’s not mass produced,” Hess said.

A few shapers, like Thomas Meyerhoffer, are embracing the factory approach and using it to craft personalized boards.

Meyerhoffer helped design the original iMac and the Flow step-in snowboard binding system. After leaving Apple, he began to focus on surfing. He’s particularly interested in longboards which, due to their size (typically 8 feet or longer), are harder to make than short boards. His design features a concave edge — a radical departure for longboards — that was designed by computer and shaped with a CNC machine.

“The computer for me is as much as of a tool as any other tool to get to where you want to be as a shaper,” Meyerhoffer says. He went through 40 prototypes while designing his longboard, something that would have been difficult to impossible with conventional hand shaping. The planer and saw are great tools for hacking off unwanted bits of foam, he says, but nothing beats a CNC machine for efficiency and consistency.

Dewey Weber is another shaper embracing the future without surrendering the past. He uses a CNC machine to do the rough work, then finishes his boards by hand.

And while sawing and shaving of a board are being done by a machine, Weber knows the human element is what matters, “The computer couldn’t do squat without that shaper. It’s just a tool. It’s basically taking your planer and your saw, your grunt tools and putting it into this milling machine.”

Mitchell and his dog, Olas, at Sunset Shapers in San Francisco. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Pages: 1 2 View All