Blair Foam is pleased announce that Steve Sales is joining their team. Steve is well known to board builders as the former general manager of White Hot EPS Foam.
Blair Foam’s owner Jeff Stoner states,” We are stoked to have Steve join our team. He brings a wealth of industry experience to Blair and will help us develop our manufacturing, service and delivery systems to be absolutely the best in the business. He will also be developing a line of EPS foam to go along with our quality polyurethane product.”
Sales says “I’m really excited to be working with Blair Foam. They have a great team of technical people who are producing one of the best urethane foams I have seen so far. Blair also acquired Green Valley Mill back in March so their ability to produce quality stringers and glue custom rockers is second to none. Add to all of this their raw material buying power and we have a very solid base from which to build Blair into the premier blank supplier for North America and Hawaii.”
Blair Foam is located in Gardena, California and all their blanks are blown at that location. More info at: www.blairfaom.com
We are actually looking at a couple of different processes at the moment.
That being said, I still believe that billet foam made from the right bead and in a specific method produces a more consistent density EPS than shape molding. There is also the huge advantage of getting so many different sizes from a wire cut billet over a shape molded unit. Last but not least, a shape molded blank (at least the ones presently on the U.S. market) heavily resists custom rocker bends, which then result in “springback” of epic proportions. The only advantage I see that a shape molded blank has over a really well made wire cut unit is they produce less waste. That becomes a moot point as more uses are being found for recycled EPS all the time. (That was why I cut outlines on all the White Hot blanks from the start. I knew that if we took the time to cut the “corners” off at our plant we could recycle all that waste. Most of our customers would have taken rectangles if we had shipped them that way, but I knew they would be throwing all those “corners” in their dumpsters for the most part and just adding to their trash bills and putting plastic in landfills. We did have guys who wanted their blanks without outlines and we did sell them that way too, but only if they asked for 'em specifically.)
So… We will see where these new processes we are investigating take us. I am wide open to what looks to work best for making a surfboard. If we discover a shape mold process that ends up being better than what I have seen out of a good billet foam to this point then we might just head down that road. Right at the moment we are concentrating hard on the Blair urethane products that have been so succesful thus far.