I've posted this before, but its pertinent to this thread. Surfboard builder Roger Hall on the weight of his wood boards:
"...I had this idea of making a wooden board for quite a long time, and I'd been collecing agave stalks for quite a while, and had a little bit of a stash and I thought, well ok, I'm gonna make this wooden board and just as a little bit of an experiment and to give the project a bit of duration I decided to copy this super-lightweight foam board (that I really liked) out of agave wood and I really put a lot of effort into making a very faithful copy. And I was actually blown away that this wooden board could be so much heavier than - it was relatively light for a wooden board - but it was a lot heavier than this superlight high performance longboard I'd been riding, and I was actually blown away at how well the board went.
"In so many ways it surprised me - in ways I never ever dreamt. The first thing was I didn't even really know if it was gonna float and so i took it to the beach - wood floats but hey - it did float, and it paddled great. The first thing I noticed was it duck dived better than my foam board and I kinda thought well maybe thats just a quirky flukey thing y'know it just seemed every time I went under a wave it duck dived better than my foam board and I thought, whats going on here? I put it down to fact that it didn't have the same corky points as a polyurethane foam blank. It just seemed to sit under the wave out of the turbulence for just a little bit longer and then it popped up. So that was something I never would have dreamed. The next thing I noticed paddling into the waves the board just seemed to have more motor - it had this really nice sure-footed feel to it as you dropped down into the waves, and it was always there for you at the bottom.
"So right from paddling the board to my first takeoff I was discovering things just bang bang bang - and it really surprised me, and I found out all kind of things, and I rode that board for two years nonstop and then you know I just had to get off it because as a shaper I wasn't experimenting any more - its kinda like Oh I don't need another board y'know so I had to stop riding it. The other thing I did at that time was I was so intrigued by the weight and how could this board be so fast and lively compared to the foam one I copied. So the next board I made I deliberately made it considerably heavier what I did was I made it out of balsa wood but what I did was I put hardwood rails on it, really heavy hard wood rails, and the board was heavy, but it was a very progressive shape, lot of rocker in it,
"Something I found you know, you drop into a wave you lay it on rail to do your bottom turn, and what the board did was it just flipped onto its rail really quickly, because the weight was in the rail - and then it held a really nice line, when you you wanted to come out of the turn and go onto the other rail it flipped onto that rail - I use the word flip but its really smoothe but really quick - so from that time on I never bothered about making another lightweight surboard again. Even when I make my foam boards I always say to my glasser, don't worry about making it light. I've already predetermined theyre not gonna be light. I either put hardwood stringers or a big piece of wood or mulitple stringers - and when I say multiple I don't mean 3 or 4, I like to put 7 or 8 or 9 - get lots of wood in there! Or what I'll do is I'll put wood rails on the board so even my foam boards are kind of almost wood boards.
"So what Ive found is that weight is really a powerful design ingredient. I think it started disappearing from surfboards in the 50's, and we've pretty much been on this one way track of getting the weight out of surfboards and out of surfing, and we've had to bring it back for tow boards, and for recreating old school noseriders and stuff. But apart from that, its really one way - not in every situation, I mean light is right - but I've found that weight is a very very potent design element and I think the road ahead is going to see weight come back into surfing, and this wooden board thing that's happening is going to really help to turn a lot of people on to that."
