Woah…Slow your roll, brother. My sources are about as direct as can be. Sorry, if you are not in the know. I think you need to re-read your own post and look in the mirror to see who sounds bitter. All I am stating is the [/b][u]FACTS.[b]
For the record, Walker does not own or have any stake in the factory in China. He sold or licensed his process to a Chinese factory. What becomes of finished blanks is not likely within his control. Especially when you consider that the agreement was signed BEFORE Clark shut down. The only leverage he may have right now would be to pull his people and secret information out of that factory. That would probably put him in breach of a contract. Given the investment the Chinese (actually Hong Kong owned) factory has made, they would not shrug their shoulders and give up. In all likelyhood, the China factory has enough knowledge to continue without Walker anyway. It would be a bumpy road for all parties if the deal fell apart.
Hmm if true more China boards we will see. More profit for China as they can stop importing blanks from Australia and produce their own much cheaper and much faster. Very disturbing this is. With such margins seems it would be easy to lure struggling desireable shapers with large royalties as there would be more margin. Hmmmm Just so happens board prices have also jumped in some cases 25-30% that creates even more margin. Especially if boards were to show up with A list logos. Makes more sense to ship a higher margin finished product then a bunch of $50 blanks. Seems something wicked this way may come. On other fronts we have lost the auto industry as Toyota has surpassed GM and China now has a 10k 4 door sedan in production. The Chinese are cunning in business and usually will have no loyalty when it comes to distribution. I hope this news is false…
The Chinese factories have been trying to produce their own blanks for over 10 years. None have been very succesful until now, with the arrival of Walker technology. Previous attempts in China have revealed that the cost to produce a blank will not be that much cheaper, maybe 5 to ten bucks. they really were striving to control their own supply of blanks, not lower cost so much.
Until now, no US distributed boards have used China produced PU blanks, and only a handful have used machine shaping. These machine shapes were shipped from australia machined, and hand finished in China. Contrary to popular belief, there is only one machine in china, and it just arrived. It is not yet fully functional. The premium price to machine a board in China, or Australia, and the longer lead times to do so have been prohibitive to the general China premise. That premise is more quantity, at a lower price, with decent quality. Most china customers are only looking for cheaper boards, not better boards. That may change in the future…
Thanks for the info. I check this forum from time to time to try to keep things in perspective it has been a valuable tool of information. I wonder who would sell a machine to China? They are probably not to popular right about now.
A lot of people have machines that aren’t running, and payments to make on those machines. A better question might be, who wouldn’t sell them one. I suspect somebody sold them a used machine when they upgraded to a newer one.
Good point.
I’ll bet you could get a pretty nice machine right now just taking over the payments.
The Walker Foam crap out … too bad really … so many were counting on this.
We use 7 of these gizmos each one programmed to either shape, glass, and sand, After we reverse engineer the secret china foam formula, we are working on 2 more that can pour blanks…
Then we just need a robot to do the surfing…
or maybe a bunch of guys surfing up north in 6/5 hooded wetsuits that surf like robots hahaha.
I could not open the LA Times article and missed out on what was said. Can someone copy and past the artical. Or can someone explain what happened to Walker Foam and China.
Thanks
Timmmyyy
Quote:
I could not open the LA Times article and missed out on what was said. Can someone copy and past the artical. Or can someone explain what happened to Walker Foam and China.
Thanks
Timmmyyy
Tide Turns for Foam Factory The demise of the No. 1 surfboard blank maker has shifted demand to Harold Walker’s firm, which had struggled for decades to stay afloat.By Leslie Earnest
Times Staff Writer
December 31, 2005
When Gordon “Grubby” Clark said this month that he was going out of business, fear rippled through the surf industry.
In a blink, the main source of surfboard blanks — the polyurethane foam cores that big producers and individual artisans alike shape into finished boards — had disappeared.
And Harold Walker, at 73, had finally gotten lucky.
The telephones at his Wilmington company, Walker Foam Inc., went crazy as surfboard makers scrambled to replenish their supplies.
“I could sell thousands of blanks right now if we had them,” said Walker, who left the business in 1973, unable to compete with Clark, but resurfaced in 1990 to give it another try. “It’s surreal.”
Hank Byzak, who recalls how his fellow surfboard makers shunned Walker’s products while Clark dominated the industry, has another way of describing the turn of events.
“I think it’s poetic justice,” said Byzak, a customer of Walker’s who owns Pure Fun Longboards in Encinitas, Calif.
Clark’s Dec. 5 announcement upended a normally laid-back, Southern California-born industry of foam blank distributors, surfboard manufacturers, backyard shapers and surf shops. Surfboard makers scrambled for blanks. Retailers raised prices — some adding $100 or more to boards typically priced from $350 to $900 — or limited the number they would sell. And surfers — totaling perhaps 2 million worldwide — wondered where their next boards would come from.
Even as Clark’s closing roiled the industry, it has presented an opportunity — and caused more than a few headaches — for Walker Foam.
The company has added a second shift and doubled its workforce to about 20, including hiring “a bunch of Clark guys,” Walker said.
“We’ve gone from not having enough orders to successfully operate the business to having the lion’s share of the market,” plant manager Gary Linden said shortly after the announcement by the 72-year-old Clark.
But the new business has come with a price. With surfboard makers desperate for blanks, Walker Foam can’t come close to meeting demand, Linden said Thursday, the stress evident in his voice.
At peak production, Clark Foam was making about 1,000 blanks a day, about 60% of global production, according to the Surf Industry Manufacturers Assn. in San Clemente. That’s 10 times what Walker Foam can produce, Linden said.
“I’ve just got this stack of orders I can’t fill,” he said. “It’s just an overwhelming thing.”
Clark’s decision has unleashed a riptide of change in an industry that has long resisted it.
In a letter announcing his company’s shutdown, Clark said, among other things, that county and state environmental regulators had targeted him for closure, an assertion that officials denied. (Nearly a month later, he and workers at his shuttered Laguna Niguel factory continue to decline requests for comment.)
The loss of a supplier with such market dominance has been particularly painful for small surfboard makers.
“I personally know several guys who couldn’t buy Christmas for the kids this year and they’re having a hard time paying the rent,” said Thomas “T.K.” Brimer, owner of Frog House, a board shop in Newport Beach.
Although some in the industry predict that supply could be back to normal in two or three months, others remain doubtful.
In some ways the industry is in upheaval as it was in the 1950s, when the popularity of surfing swelled and balsa wood, which was then used to make surfboards, became scarce. That was when board makers started “fiddling around with foam,” Walker said. Among them were renowned shaper and surf shop owner Hobart “Hobie” Alter and Clark, who worked for him.
Walker began fiddling too, mixing chemicals in a 3-gallon cardboard ice cream container. After his first experiment, he said, he was “hooked.”
“It was maybe 10 seconds — poof!” Walker recalled. “I had foam all over the place.”
Clark initially made blanks only for Alter while Walker started making them for others. Hap Jacobs, 75, a widely known shaper, remembers Walker peddling blanks that were “strapped all over his little car.”
His business took off, Walker said, recalling the day his office manager appeared with "eyes as big as saucers and said, ‘Harold, we’ve got $120,000 in our checking account.’ "
Soon, though, Clark sprinted ahead of Walker, making his own chemicals, building his own equipment and keeping prices so low that others could not compete, industry insiders say.
“In a lot of ways he raised the bar higher than anyone will probably raise it again in terms of quality, diversity of product and service,” said Rusty Preisendorfer, a prominent shaper and owner of Rusty Surfboards in San Diego.
Clark “helped a lot of the manufacturers get going,” said Bill Bahne, who represents surfboard manufacturers on the surf industry association’s board. “He was always right there for everybody.”
But Clark also “had a firm grip on the industry,” Bahne said.
Several shapers and shop owners said Clark was never shy about using his market power to keep customers from using other suppliers, including Walker.
Clark’s business mushroomed as it produced blanks in a variety of sizes and adapted to the changes of the early 1970s, when shortboards became popular and longboards faded, another shift that hurt Walker, whose customers at the time mostly made longboards.
By 1973, Walker had given up.
In the intervening years, he became a commercial fisherman and invested in real estate — making a bundle and then losing “every cent,” he said. But after longboarders began reappearing in the late 1980s, he dug out his old foam formulas.
“Nothing had changed,” Walker said — including the challenge of competing with Clark Foam. “Up to the day that Clark quit, it was really a struggle.”
With his longtime competitor finally out of the picture, Walker said recently, his company could, within three months, be making 600 to 800 blanks a day, including some made in China.
“We’re zipping,” Walker said. “We’re trying to make as many blanks and as many friends as we can.”
But Linden, in a somber mood Thursday, said the Chinese operation wasn’t coming online as quickly as expected. China is “a long way away,” he said. “Ten thousand miles and a lot of other barriers too.”
He declined to give specifics about the difficulties the company had encountered in Asia, where President Joe Boyle, Walker’s stepson, is overseeing operations.
The company is working to expand domestic operations with a goal of making 500 blanks a day here, Linden said.
The industry, in any case, has no intention of becoming overly reliant on one company again. And plenty of businesses are hustling to get a piece of the action, including Just Foam of Riverside, which began shipping blanks five months ago and is “overwhelmed” with orders, owner Scott Saunders said.
The surf industry association is urging board makers to use polystyrene foam and scheduling seminars to teach them how. The industry also is reaching out to polyurethane foam makers in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Britain and Argentina.
“I think we’ve all learned to be not so dependent,” Preisendorfer said.
For his part, Donald Takayama, who owns Hawaiian Pro Designs in Oceanside, said he was simply glad that Walker had finally “got a chance.”
“He can bow out of here when his time is up with a smile on his face,” he said.
Jaimehcc
Thanks for the post. Makes it a lot easier to understand the other posts.
Timmmyyy
Making urethane blanks isn’t as easy as some would think and those saying there will be lots of urethane blanks in the future don’t know what their talking about. If you have a business don’t depend in anyones word, save yourself. EPS is the sure thing here … the only sure thing right now.
I agree with Greg Eps is the future. That’s just how it is.
Greg is right about making foam. Making foam is easy, making consisent low density surfboard grade urethane is not. Also, growing a business from under 100 units per week to 1000 units per day is a recipe for disaster. Even in surfboards, look at all the companies that crash and burn when they try to grow quickly. Everything changes, everything(Employee issues, overhead, money, regulatory issues in all aspects of the business, ect…). Personally, I hope Walker has success, but they have a high risk to crash and burn if they have the wrong people running the show in a growth situation.
they have been putting out a lot more blanks right now and they are looking better than ever.
Taken right off the site!!! I’m surprised i has not been posted here yet.
So anyway we don’t know why Gordon decided to do what he did,
but all we’re trying to do is deal with the chaos.
Harold Walker, December 31, 2005
One month after Blank Monday – December 5, 2005, a day that continues to live in infamy and generate volumes of rumor – Harold Walker, Gary Linden and the increasing labor force at Walker Foam are beginning to get a handle on the future.
The abrupt closure of Clark Foam generated many questions, and one of the biggest had to do with the volume of blanks they produced a year. That number was a mystery even to Harold Walker, who has been involved in commercial blank production since 1959, and even longer than Gordon Clark: “I figured Clark was doing 500 blanks a day,” Walker said. “But I was way off.”
At the Walker Foam plant in Wilmington you can see the Palos Verdes Peninsula off in the distance, but beyond that was another mountain –a mountain of potential business of a scale that shocked Harold Walker: “Clark made his decision in December which was our slowest month anyway,” Walker said. “But since then we have I would say we have tripled our work force and tripled our production. These guys came in that we hired from Clark and they said he was doing more than twice my estimate. As many as 1200 blanks a day. That is amazing and now we know what we are faced with. We are gearing up to produce 1200 blanks a day and we have it in the works right now. We’re going for it and we are gearing up two other facilities to support the operation here in Wilmington. We are moving the entire mixing process out of the LA Basin and we have an operation producing blanks in China that will be shipping soon.”
Among the many rumors swirling around the Clark closure is that he was pursued by an ambitious employee of Orange County Haz Mat and there are serious closed indictments against Clark and his company. Harold Walker is too busy to find out if those rumors are true, but the first move he is making is to move the mixing of toxic chemicals out of the Los Angeles Basin: “You know, back during the Korean war guys sniffed TDI to simulate asthma and get out of the draft,” Walker said. “It’s nasty stuff and the LA Basin doesn’t need it, so the first thing we are doing is moving the mixing operation out of here. It was okay when we were small, but it’s a whole different ballgame now. I have a guy out in the desert right now talking to city managers about locating a plant out there, and we plan to be doing our mixing out there in the middle of nowhere as soon as possible.”
Harold Walker has a guy out in the desert setting up a plant, but he also has a guy in the plant in Wilmington, which is anything but deserted. Gary Linden has taken a permanent position as General Manager of Walker Foam, and he is the busiest man in the surf industry. Linden’s relationship with Walker goes back to 1990, when Walker began making blanks again after a 17-year absence. “When Harold started blowing blanks Donald Takayama gave me one and I shaped a board for myself and it rode better,” Linden said. “It was stronger and I thought: ‘This is great. I’ll buy a little bit of Walker Foam for my custom orders and my team riders and I’ll keep on Clark Foam.” I had it on the rockers for the machine and stuff and things were rolling and it was good. But when I did that, Clark Foam didn’t deliver a couple of big orders that I was depending on, and then I was blacklisted completely from the San Diego supplier. Well I don’t like being pushed around and I thought Walker Foam was better, so I figured, ‘Well I will do business with someone I like.’”
As General Manager, Linden is responsible for just about everything: Hiring new foamers and stringer-benders, answering the endless phone calls and dealing with clients old and new who range from scared to apologetic to angry: “A lot of people are coming in here, telling Harold Walker the industry owes him an apology,” Linden said, but Harold is brushing it off: “We aren’t holding any grudges. We’re just happy and smiling here, trying to fill orders and make it work.”
Looking off into the future, Walker sees a more open market in the days after Clark: “I don’t want all of the market. I don’t think the industry should fall for the same thing twice and have one supplier. I don’t want the responsibility of Walker Foam failing and then the industry going, ‘Oh gee were screwed.’ So we welcome one competitor and we would like to keep them relatively small compared to us so that… because we want security and we have grandiose ideas.”
Gary Linden, Harold Walker and the daily-growing Walker Foam team are doing their best to meet the demands of a California shaping industry who are starting to see the supply of post-apocalypse blanks dwindle.
“By the end of the first week of January we will be up to 200 blanks a day,” Walker said, both wearily and proudly. “That is going to put a little stop in the panic locally. We can’t do anything on the East Coast or Hawaii, but there are blanks in Hawaii and more going I think and I think there is some inventory on the East Coast. We plan to double our production to 400 to 500 a day, and we have tentative deals going, sources of supply we have worked with for an additional 800 a day.”
Walker is staying close-lipped about China, but parking is getting scarce along that side street of Wilmington as more and more shapers are learning what Joe Bark, Gene Cooper, Gary Linden, Hap Jacobs, Donald Takayama and Gordie have known going back to 1959: Walker Foam shapes nice. “I sold Greg Saurtich some blanks and he called me and said, ‘Hey this stuff is great! I just shaped the 6’ 4” and it’s better than any of the Clark molds.’” Linden said. “Well I’ve known that all along, and now people are going to have a chance to see for themselves.”
Walker Foam are still asking those looking for blanks to send a fax to the factory and not call, so Gary and Harold can spend less time pacing up and down the street on their cell phones, and more time producing blanks.