Based on the questions I see here, I wonder if some builders have any real experience riding surfboards. Does that matter?
We went from learning how to fix dings, to learning how to strip and rebuild boards out of necessity. That came after more than a few years of surfing. But back then surfing wasn’t a mainstream activity like it is today.
I know there’s a lot of old timers here with tons of experience. I wonder how long you surfed before you got into building boards.
At least 30 years of surfing for me before I started shaping. We all did our own ding repair when we were kids. Used beat up boards we fixed. No one had any money.
surfed for maybe 5 before i bought my first blank…
Those 5 years i loved to call myself the neighborhood ding dude, but really i was just better than my friends with solarez and a popsicle stick.
Brings up another point though. The years you only surfed, before you started shaping, did you have a big/diverse quiver? my dad got me started on shortboards and kept me there. i never had ridden a longboard except a doyle. first longboard i shaped was a Piece of ____, but my first shortboard wasnt all that bad. I had more of an idea of where to balance foam and all that stuff since i knew the feel a little better.
2-3 years.
When I started shaping I couldn’t do a cutback.
I surfed for several years before I had a real surfboard. But growing up in an extended beach ohana there were always boards to use and learn on. Back then most boards were still what we consider logs, anything short was something crudely made by one of the older guys, like a paipo or knee board. The short boards back then were still around 7’. By the time my father decided we were worthy of real boards they were down below 7’ I think we got 6’10" pop outs.
Thanks to the rocky shoreline at Shark Country, ding repair was a regular thing. The first couple of strip and reshape jobs were at best very crude shapes. I knew nothing about the finer points of surfboard design. What I did know was what outline I could get out of what I had left. The only reason the boards were stripped down was because they were in such bad shape that ding repair was not an option. By then I had been surfing over 10 years.
It was more than 25 years later that I decided to “make” a board, and by then I knew exactly what I like and want in a board. Key words here are what I like and want. That’s the most important thing when I buy a board, who the shaper is and what they specialize in.
I built my first board before I started surfing. There wasn’t any boards or shop around back then where I lived, we just thought as snowboarders that surfing would be a fun thing to do when the winter was over. Board was made out of pour foam, glassed with boat resin, the leash plug was a nail resined into the board, leash was a nylon rope. Shape was lifted from a photo in a snowboard mag, way too much rocker, way too small, way too thin, way too hard rails. We did have a lot of fun though trying to surf that thing. Wish I still had it. And wish I had swaylocks back then.
If you count trying to put broken EPS bellyboards back together and reshaping them slightly, zero years.
From the time I got my first 'real board'' and started standing up, two and a half years.
I surfed for 30 years before I shaped my first board. I always wanted to learn. Who’s gonna teach you? Shaping was a pretty closed world to most of us when I was a kid. I thought there were two types of people. People who could shape surfboards and those that couldn’t. Now I think there are still two types. Those who can shape a surfboard and those that can shape a surfboard really well.
I asked a friend to let me watch. He declined, but told me it was just a procedure. I thought, ‘shit, I can learn a procedure.’ Bought the JC tape a few years later and gave it a try. I’ve been building my own ever since. I built 10 or so before I discovered Swaylocks. I was surprised people were willing to share the knowledge just for the pure stoke. It’s a revolution, really, the Internet and all of this. Mike
For me, it was about 6 months of sharing rental boards with my brother and sister at Barber’s, I was still a kook, but knew I needed to surf more to get better, 20 minutes at a time with a sibling pacing back and forth on the shore line waiting for me to fall and have the board wash in. By the time I swam in, they had paddled out. Having pops help me build the first one made a whole lot of difference of how it looked.
It was solid teal green with the pigment coming from Arakawa’s.
One day the side shore winds at Barbers were so strong that I lost my board and it started flipping from rail to rail toward Makaha, it went about 150 yards before it landed flat and stopped, now that was a swim, no reforms to push me along !!!
Hi Jim, funny how things were so different back then. Boards were harder to get in the 60’s but making boards wasn’t that bad. Our board making was delivered a severe blow when my dad tried to make me one. He was given a blank from one of the beach ohana, and shaped me a really nice spear. Problem was he didn’t know much about poly resin, and that Lam resin stayed tacky. He waited and waited and waited but the resin stayed tacky, so he just stopped. Damned if we only knew that all we needed to do was put on a coat of sanding resin and we’d be styling. I was still in elementary school when that happened and it was a while before we got him to help us do anything with boards again. I don’t remember what he used to repair my old pop out, but when he was done, he painted the whole board with spray paint. It came out really nice, but it was bit heavy. Then of course the rocks at SC just ended up eating it again.
I bet dad could have made some really cool boards, he had a lifetime of being in the water, and his father used to build his own boats. I remember the nose had turned up rails and then they transitioned to turned down rails in the tail. Probably was what they call a displacement hull these days.
I was still a kook, but knew I needed to surf more to get better, Heck Jim your prolly just an Old Kook now ! One that can shape boards like a Genius. I mean heck if your over 50 and surf and shape surfboards theres gotta be something wrong . Time to grow up and get a real job and resposibility like all the old farts !! No more playin around and enjoying life !! Heck every one thinks Im an Old Kook ! Their still trying to figure out how I make a living when I spend so many hours a day at the beach ! Being an Old Kook is kool ! not only that the boards you shape have soul !!!!!
Almost 20 years for me and I think that made a big difference in my shaping progression. But I think the most important thing that helped me shape good boards was that in those 20 years I owned 100’s and 100’s of boards of every kind and shape. I payed attention to the shapes I had and I remember how they rode. And 25 years later I’m shaping boards out of memory from boards I had in the past that I liked. I had a magic Ernie Tanaka longboard with the “Full Barrel” concave and I still shape my personal longboards with that feature because it works so well. I thing knowing rail shapes and how to shape them well comes from having studied the boards you had and remembering the shapes and contours that worked best. I’ve had a few Brewer guns, some Difinderfers and a few Rawsons and I tripped on every inch of those boards, where the edge started, the pintail outlines, the wide point placement etc. I have their lines committed to my memory!
BB
Been surfing for 25 years. been shaping for 11.
I started surfing during the summer of 1966 (boards were still in the 10’ + range: paddling and standing up was no big deal, but pearling was…). No leash, of course, so you either kept to the board or developped very good swimming abilities… For those who know, the lineup at Guéthary can be quite far from shore (especially during extreme low tides) and boards frequently ended in the rocks, hence the need to learn how to fix dings. From then on, it was just natural to become interested with “what was inside” a board. You have to remember that not so many things were plastic-made by then. Foam, fiberglass and resin were just a whole new world for me. I can remember the magic of shiny fiberglass cloth becoming perfectly clear around the fin while one of the older guys at the Urkirola Surf Club showed me how to stick it back on the board after it was ripped off by a rock or something. This got me stripping a lot of old logs and I started re-shaping them. The first board I shaped from scratch was during the winter of 1969, in Paris. Foam blanks were not yet available at the time so I bought some balsa lumbers, glued them together with straps and shaped the whole thing with a block plane and some sanding paper. I was working with a friend in a room on the 7th floor of where my parents lived and when we started glassing, neighbours called the firemen (the smell of resin had mistaken them with a gas leakage)… We had some trouble explaining what we were actually doing…
Then, it went the usual way: building more and more boards for me, then for close friends, then for friend’s friends, and so on…
my god-brother, mitch took me surfing for the first time in stone harbor nj in may of 1986…bought my first surfboard (used) from george and mitch (not my god-brother) at surfer supplies in ocnj circa 1987…got my first custom surfboard from lyn shell (H.I.C.) when i worked at k-coast surf shop in ocmd in 1994…did ding repair for myself and friends for years…shaped my first board in early 2007, shaped my first board for someone else in mid 2007…consider myself to be blessed to still be at it
zero years. By that time I was already well familiar with moulding fibreglass canoes in the school canoe club and my first surfboard was built there using similar techniques ie. it was a moulded board aka pop-out. The ideas were all the wood work teachers who ran the club. Our products were built by team-work, so no single person produced a canoe or pop-out surfboard single handed.
However I did build the school's first custom board in the club and the woodwork teacher and myself did the lam together - two pairs of hands work fast than one when neither of us had used a squeegee before - canoes and pop-outs are done differently - rollers for wetting the lam and brushes for the tight corners in the mould.
I then went on to build a series of home-builds for the next 15 yrs before owning a professionally built board, although I did get instructions from industry pros at a factory along the way.
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Based on the questions I see here, I wonder if some builders have any real experience riding surfboards. Does that matter?
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and the question of does it matter? No not really, its just a hobby. It might have held my surfing back a bit, riding some badly designed and experimental shapes, but it increased my understanding of surfboards which is part of the fun for most of us on swaylocks.
Pretty much zero for me as well. After 4 years bodyboarding I decided i wanted to challenge myself when the waves were small but as i was studying at university i dint have the money available for a new (or even 2nd hand board). By chance i met up with a friend who had shaped a board and when i heard how much the materials would cost my mind was set! In his garage and with his guidance i shaped my first board (6'6" fish - Assumed i would be naturally gifted and it had to fit in my car). Looking back at it now as it sits in the corner of my garage it looks really rough and wonky but it got me from a basic learner and inspired my creative side.
3 years down the line I moved into a place with a garage and set to work. Thankfully my handwork has improved and getting to ride different boards over the last few years has helped a lot.
I guess my message is: surfing experience does help you make a board with a certain perfomance in mind. But if you are keen to start mowing some foam and you don't set your sights too high there is nothing stopping you.
i startet shaping just a yaer after my first surfsessions. at this time i was windsurfing for nearly 10 years. so i think i had a good feeling how my boards work…
Based on the questions I see here, I wonder if some builders have any real experience riding surfboards. Does that matter?
it depends which type of boards you gonne shape. if you are an intermediate surfer you can shape intermediate-boards quite well, but it will be more difficult to shape an hp-shortboard… just because you dont have the ability to rate your board for your next shapeattempt…
my first boards worked quite well for my surfing ability back then, but my shapes nowaday´s are working much better… just the experience you got over the time
20 years. Always fixed my own dings as a teenager and I did want to build one back then, but didn’t really know how to get started, get supplies, etc. Internet/Swaylocks really helped me figure it all out. But I’ve only built 3, so far, but that number will keep going up.
0 years. I learned to surf on the first board I built.
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