I’m having a hard time finding any comments and opinions about the actual performance of balsa boards made in Ecuador. No doubt the material makes for good riding, but how about the quality of design/craftsmanship by Ecuadorian shapers? Shark Bay balsa boards have a nice website and some good eye candy, but no info on design yet.
Anybody out there actually rode a board shaped from Shark Bay? Or how about Balsaflite and Skip Kozminski’s boards?
cheers, Matt
Every year at least one or 2 of these boards makes through our factory. The price is always right, but as they say you pay for what you get. The shaping and general quality isn’t top notch.
Always check out the references from others before buying from out of the country. A Swaylocker was going to go into biz with one of the Equadorian balsa boards builders and got ripped for his efforts.
Mattynz1 - Funny you should mention Shark Bay Balsa - I was looking at their website as well (the only one I could find - the Balsa Flite one appears DOA). I briefly corresponded with with someone their and was quoted $800 delivered fpr a 10 footer and subsequently offered the same price for a hollow model. You almost pay this price for a Surftech of middle of the raod pu/pe LB. Tempting…
But Jim Phillips makes sense about the lack of good design or quality control - they just can’t be shaped as nicely as that of an old school California shaper - that’s why solid or hollow balsa boards cost $2,000 - $2,500 here!
I see that a guy in Miami is selling some here on Swaylocks…
I wish I could buy a balsa LB with the quality of Jim for $800…
Caveot emptor…
so are we talking about balsaflite or shark bay here? im interested in getting a balsa board and the gu yat balsaflight seemed pretty knowledgable after I read this ?
mattynz1,
I have examined three of the Equadorian Balsa boards over the past several years. The wood was light, the glassing and gloss on a par with US standards. The shaping, and outlines, were not well executed. They did not look like they would perform well, at all.
on a differen tnote, would ordering a board form an ecuadorianshaper be almost as bad as buying a chinaboard in regards to not supporting my local shaper and country?
Good point. The problem is finding a shaper willing to work on balsa, and that is a capable designer/shaper, and that understands the material. I do, but I’m not doing any balsa boards for anyone else, only for my own personal use. Best man out there, hands down, is Jim Phillips, for anyone that wants to experience what a balsa board can be. I would recommend him to anyone.
I’d give Balsa Flite a shot–Skip tells the whole story totally convincingly, and isn’t afraid to name names–he e-mailed me some pics of some fish, and I thought they looked like The shit
They were inexpensive too, even shipped. Nice freakin guy, I mean really nice, super cool, just bailed on this country and is loving life inexpensively where he is, as far as I can tell. HAs shipped multiple boards and blanks to Texas to the same people in S Padre, is what he told me.
Also he holds a 20-some year-old US patent on a method of balsa HWS construction, is how I found him in the first place…
His site is being revised apparently–here’s the Longboard letter–it’s too good to let lie in a link
Dear Longboard Network,
I started surfing in 1962 at the age of 12 in Redondo Beach where we lived. My first board cost $10. and was a repainted Velzy solid balsa and deck rocker with a mahogany half moon fin. I started surfing because all my cool friends did and I was a generally watery kid. We lived a couple miles from the water so I made a rickshaw to haul the 40-pounder behind my three-speed bike. I did most of this surfing in south Hermosa and the Redondo breakwater. After moving to San Diego, I mostly surfed Ocean Beach and The Cliffs.
In 1971, I joined the Peace Corps, my job site being Playas Ecuador, where I still live and make the “stix”. I joined Peace Corps because I wanted to live in a place with a traditional culture, low population density, tropical weather, and surf. Being able to make a living off the boards was the unexpected goodie.
Maybe one of my main reasons for choosing to live in Ecuador is that one is able to live in the slow lane. You have time to spend on the things you want to spend it on and you don’t find yourself obliged to do a bunch of shit you don’t want to. I work at home, have three bicycles and no car. I only have to make one surfboard which gives me the hundred dollars my wife and I live on each week. I check the surf from the front porch and then work out my three-day work agenda for the week. I eat my meals at home and I don’t ever watch TV. I probably read 20 books a year. We seem to have a pretty lot of visitors seeing as we don’t even have a sign on the shop or a telephone.
During a family reunion, we decided that the whole circus was going to be called “Balsa Flite”. I liked it because it sounded like a glider. Our other name is “Corre Tumbos Chopoya”. Chopoya is the Indian name for where we live (Playas). You’ll just have to figure out “Corre Tumbos” by yourself.
I started making “Mar Bravo Surfboards” with an Ecuadorean partner. Part of that business involved exportation of blanks. Which is basically how my partner had an attack of good thinking and got out of the surfing industry. That was what we started with. The evolution has mostly appeared in the structure of the blanks.
Once upon a time (in the ‘80’s), we built them with a Styrofoam core. Now, they are basically two sheets of balsa separated every 6 or 8 inches by balsa separators which dictate the thickness and foil of the blank. These sheets and separators are then flexed and clamped over a jig or strongback that induces the rocker. Other guys cut their rocker out of straight pieces creating lots of expensive waste and they can never get 9 inches of nose rocker and 3 inches of tail rocker that I put on my 12 foot gun blank.
These compartmentalized cores are then cut into 3 or 4 pieces and glued up again on the rocker jig with 2-3 cedar or mahogany stringers. These multi-stringered cores are then finished off with strips of balsa that approximately focus on the plan shape of the finished stick. This is the only way I have found (after building about 1200 boards) to make a 20-25 pound, 9’6” which will be stronger than any foam 9’6”, even if it weighs 100 lb.
I’m only in business today because I have been making a cheap, durable, user-friendly product that makes economic sense in a third-world country. The local Ecuadorean market is who demanded a dependable cheap product. These “babies” last so long you recoup your investment over the years because you aren’t snapping surfboards so often.
We feel cheated when someone hangs one on a wall. These are surfboards to surf on! Not surfboard replicas to be excluded from the ocean.
Since some times I’m the only board builder in the country, a large part of my business has always been beginner’s boards. The smallest was 4’8” and the biggest was 9’8”. Almost every famous shaper makes shitty beginner’s boards. Because all these dorks are making identical boards out of the same blanks as a beginner, you get a slightly oversized version of a professional competition thruster or a gun. With me, you get something that fits under your arm (I’ve made 13” wide stix) and floats your waist-band “high and dry” with heaps of rocker. They almost always stand up several times on the first day out.
Presently, I build no “thrusters”. Short boards may be a twin-fin “fish” or single fins. Tankers get singles, single plus trackers, and also, old time half moon fins. Because the blanks have flat decks, the boards have much flatter decks than “modern surfboards”. I don’t like domed decks. Then make the board sink too much when you’re paddling. As you try to steer it with your body, the rails sink and the board tries to squirt out from under you. Also, after you finally catch a wave, in order to turn, you have to put pressure on the rails. When your heel (on the dome) is higher than your toes (on the low rail), you lose mechanical advantage.
Another reason I have for “not conforming” (for me, a lifelong condition) is that on a thruster, you don’t move your feet. My smallest board is a 5’10” fish, 22” wide (I weigh 165 lb.) and I noseride it daily and hang five commonly.
Five or ten years ago, Surfer Magazine gave a (then) famous pro, Martin Potter, a collection of fine surfboards to critique. Starting with a beautiful balsa tanker Diffenderfer shaped in the mid-50’s. This poor, dumb, overpaid kook didn’t even know how to hang five! Couldn’t even handle a small brewer single fin. Like Laird Hamilton once said, “the money in pro surfing is going to children” (in surfing stature). To me, this is the legacy of the thruster…overpaid professional kooks, surfing midgets.
I usually make about 50 surfboards a year and about 50 blanks. As the balsa tree grows, it must become stronger as it has more weight aloft to support. It does this by becoming fatter. This wood added to the outside of the trunk is always denser. This means somewhere between 15 and 20 inches in diameter, which takes 3-5 years growth in the area where the balsa trees are cut. It is one of the steepest foothills of the Andes, behind Babahoyo, if you want to find it on a map. The town is called, Echandia. My wood comes from a nearly abandoned haciendia, a two-minute walk from the center of town (pop. 5000). The hacienda was planted in the 1940’s and 1950’s with banana and orange trees. Subsequently, hybrids better suited to transport reduced the demand for these bananas (which keep reproducing anyway) to the point where when we go on an expedition, you find delicious ripe bananas that have fallen on the ground! One-half mile from the center of town! Ditto the oranges too.
This place gets 8-10 feet of rainfall a year. They grow rice here on rolling fields, like corn or wheat elsewhere. Not in paddies like everywhere else. So by the time the balsa seedling (which as far as I know has at 3” in diameter, the biggest leaf in the jungle) has lived it’s 3-5 years, it has produced between one-half to one million seeds. They are the size of a grain of sand and come equipped with a copper colored cotton that hummingbirds use to make nests with. Balsa is the aggressive invader in the forest. It’s the main cash crop of the hacienda. They don’t even have to plant because of the configuration of the tree, the typical yield of each one is 3-4 x 6 ‘x 10’ pieces of wood. Five to six of these make a hollow blank. Six to eight make a solid one with less rocker.
Given my present market demand and my personal living habits, if I were to build a greenhouse 300 feet in diameter, I could supply myself for good. I realize my production of 50 a year must look like a “misprint”, but my boards all carry the guarantee that if you snap it, you get a new one for ½ the price. In the last three years, I haven’t had to replace even one. Remember I make 9’6” guns for Pico Alto in Peru. If you figure half of all foam surfboards snap or delaminate in their first three years of service, the number of balsas in use is ever increasing.
Frequently I take shit for not keeping up with modern shaping conventions. The few times I see an intelligent idea…I always steal it. Thank you D. & M. Campbell for instance. Fuck (no thank) you Al Merrick and Rusty for shitty rockers, domed decks, unfoiled tails and too much hype. Five fins! Surfing is supposed to be a fun, childish activity. But it doesn’t have to be stupid.
We build the boards in a mostly open air shop. Luis, my carpenter for the last 25 years, makes two or three blanks a week and when we get a “big” order (more than five), his nephew comes in to double production. We used to glass them in a bamboo “carport” here at my house, but my glasser set up shop in his own backyard, so he still glasses them, but now as a contractor. He also makes the occasional recycled foam board and also uses my blanks sometimes.
Just as the structural configuration (cheap, durable and easy to ride) evolved to meet the market, so has the design. We get a lot of waist to head high, clean and bumpy surf, and then it gets to double overhead a few times a year. All my boards tube ride and noseride easy. That’s tankers. Guns are based on personal preferences and when some hot shot big wave rider orders one, they always insist on watching me shape it and that always helps add to one’s bag of tricks. I agree with Dave Parmenter when he puts the wide part forward on his guns. Width gives you planing ease. You need it to catch the bitch. Having the width forward to get you planing quicker, then have a nice narrow tail for more control when you get flying. The “modern’ idea of having the wide part of a gun in the middle and a tail wide enough to accommodate three fins (again) is just more thruster contamination. If it looks like your 6’2”, you’re more likely to buy it. Remember, it’s far more important to Rusty if you buy it than if you can surf it.
My longboards all use more rocker than a comparable foamie. Nose rocker is real gradual (no kick) and tail rocker is real sharp (lots of kick). This favors nose riding and turning. You can cut back from on the nose.
I don’t know if I’m more proud when I get the test pilot’s report back from Pico Alto, or Puerto Escondido, or Sunset Beach (I don’t think one’s ever been out at Maverick’s) or when some beginner comes back from the beach here on a board I lent them and tells me they had their best day surfing ever. I love making surfboards.
Since Ecuador is on the 10 most corrupt countries list, I stay a long way away from politics. Instead of fighting the oil companies, I just don’t own a car. You can only buy one of these stix if you deal with one of us. Five or ten a year go to the states to my distributors Jungle Balsa and AK. About 50 blanks a year get shaped some place between North Carolina and Hawaii and I sell all the rest out of my house for $300. apiece, custom made under warranty.
To me, longboarding compared to some kid on a thruster, is the difference between having a backstage pass or going for years to concerts buying your tickets at ticketron. A tanker forces you to have a much more complete repertory of moves, and gives you the ability to make these moves on a wider range of waves. This is just as true if you have surfed for five months or 50 years. At it’s best, surfing is a path to freedom. You are only more free to do more cool stuff as you learn to fill your live with positive experiences and clear out dumb superstitions. I started on this path as a pathetically conformist adolescent, just wanting to be like a surfer. Thirty-eight years later, I am a fanatic non-conformist who makes his living perpetrating encounters between other searchers and their ocean.
Longboarding is sort of a prize for guys who just wouldn’t be convinced to quit surfing. The greatest threat to surfing? Growing and becoming responsible is the single biggest problem. We need a lot less Bill Gates in this world and a lot more Dorian Paskowitzes.
To me, the most fun days are either when it all of a sudden gets to like double o’head and is kinda lumpy and bumpy and you gotta be real careful on the take off and do everything just right, or when it’s perfect glass and waist to shoulder high. But since the water here never gets below about 70 F, you go out no matter how big, small, bad or good it is. Cause you never come in wishing you hadn’t gone out.
As a surfboard and blank building surfer, I’d have to say that the most memorable and rewarding moments in this whole deal has been meeting some of the greats in surfing. The colleagues one finds in surfing is a tremendous reward.
Besides surfboard building and surfing, my next most important occupation is boat building and sailing. Once upon a time, the same guys and I spent four years fixing a 10’ x 30’ hole in a sailboat, refitting every part, bolt and nut, stem to stern, mastlight to keelbolts. Then sailed it to the Galapagos a couple of times. Hasn’t sunk yet and it’s been 10 years. We sailed a catamaran from Florida through the Panama canal to Ecuador. That took 44 days.
The only goal I have in the whole world is to go on a sailing surf cruise around the world for about five years. Especially so I can meet even more surf crazies to make even more capable surfboards.
Skip “Andres” Kozminski
I have not seen anybody shape Balsawood better that Eisaku. A Japaneese Shaper who lives in Huntington Beach. He got his start shaping from Bob Hurley. Eisaku made furniture in Japan before moving to the US.
Looking back over my post - 30 lashes for not using spellcheck!
The guy I corresponded with at Shark Bay could not have been nicer; and, its very tempting to order a balsa (solid or hollow/chambered) delivered to the US for the price of a basic poly or epoxy LB these days. But Bill supported Jim’s statement in regard to the somewhat poorly executed designs by the local Ecuadorean shapers. Good money after bad money I suppose…
Of what I read the absolute best balsa is grown in Ecuador and the country’s labor costs are low - thus the high quality material and low cost - the actual shaping seems to be the problem.
I will take a look at the Balsa Flite site.
Contact for the shaper/custom furniture maker in HB?
As far as the geopolitical impact of purchasing from Ecuador vs. China vs. USA - that another topic for another day…
Anyone buy a Shark Bay balsa either directly or from the guy in Miami?
Another guy in Oregon also imports and sells balsa boards - do a Google search…
…there is no way that you compare to buy one or a handful of Ecuadorian Balsa boards than buying containers full of PU or sandcompos. boards from China…
buy several boards with wood that grow there dont tear the USA economy…
i’m thinking about getting a balsaflite when i get back from australia.
some other sways people mus tknow something!
Did you ever purchase a BalsaFlite from Kozminski?