The Soul of Surfing: Hand-Shaped Boards in a Factory-Built World

Sunset Shapers owner James Mitchell shapes a custom board at the San Francisco shop. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

James Mitchell takes his electric planer from the shelf and, with skill that comes only from years of experience, sets to work shaping a slab of polyurethane. He shaves a millimeter here, a millimeter there, periodically running his hand over the surface to check his progress. It’s more art than science, done largely by eye and by feel. Satisfied that he’s got the right shape, Mitchell takes out a hand planer and repeats the process. Then he takes out a sanding block, and repeats the process.

This takes a couple of hours. Once he’s happy with the surface of the board — slightly concave on top and convex on the bottom, with a bow from front to back — Mitchell takes out a saw, a pencil and two templates cut from wood. He uses these to finalize the board, cutting the slab into the shape we all associate with a surfboard. Once done, the board, a mini-gun designed for the large pounding waves found at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, is ready for fiberglassing.

“It’s more artistry. It’s more of a craft. You get an idea in your mind’s eye and then be able to create it by hand is a lot more fulfilling. I can scrub out 10 CNC boards and it’s never as satisfying as one really good hand shape,” Mitchell says.

Mitchell makes precision marks by hand. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Shaping a board is a painstaking process, and it can take a guy like Mitchell six to eight hours to craft a single board. Meanwhile, a factory in Asia can use a CNC machine to turn out a board in minutes, and repeat the process hundreds of times a day. Those boards are, in many ways, the same as the boards Mitchell has been making since opening his shop in 2010.

But they’re also completely different. They’re a commodity.

For many people, surfing is more than a sport, it’s a spiritual experience. It’s also a sport defined by community, the “locals only” mentality that not only defines territory, but the friendships between a surfer and the guy who made the board he rides. Your shaper knows where and how you surf and what you’re strengths and weaknesses are, and uses that knowledge to build the best board for you. This relationship is, for some people, so important that legendary shaper Gary Linden says, “If I didn’t shape, the best shaper I knew would be my best friend.”

These days, however, a board can be ordered online as easily as socks and made to order like pizza. The speed and ease of large-scale manufacturing, compounded with the shortage of boards caused by the sports’ growing popularity, has factory-built boards from overseas pushing local shapers out of a lot of surf shops.

In 2010, only 63 percent of surfboards sold in the United States were made there, down from 74 percent in 2004. And while the stats from Surf Industry Manufactures Association don’t note whether a surfboard was made by a man or a machine, most of these imported boards are factory made.

This is a sea change. Surfboards have long been made by hand. The first of them were made of wood. Bob Simmons started experimenting with polyurethane, which was cheaper and easier to use, after World War II. Shapers Whitey Harrison and Hobie Alter refined the process through the 1950s. By the 1960s, polyurethane was the standard. Almost every board in existence starts as a slab, known as a blank, of the stuff, which is covered with fiberglass after shaping.

Thanks to CNC machines, drafting software, new materials, and rising demand for inexpensive boards, more boards are being made in factories overseas. This started in earnest when Clark Foam, until then leading supplier of blanks, shut down suddenly in 2005. With the supply of polyurethane blanks severely curtailed, unconventional materials like epoxy and expanded polystyrene came into vogue.

As with an mass-produced product, quality varied. While companies like Firewire strive to create high-quality boards based on the designs by guys like Gary Linden and Daniel “Tomo” Thompson, others fill the market with throwaway boards.

Factory-built boards are at odds with the romantic notion of riding boards shaped by craftsmen drawn to the craft by their love of surfing, not money. A blank costs about $100; having it glassed can cost $400. Given that most boards sell for six hundred bucks or so, it isn’t hard to see no one’s getting rich shaping surfboards.

Mitchell, sanding down a custom board. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

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