Shapeshifting – The art of hand-making surfboards
Critical issues 1: Mass production vs handmade
Having a board shaped by hand is primarily about the search for performance, but it is more than that.
Industrialisation has vanquished many crafts, and globalisation is now threatening traditional shaping. In the early 1990s, surfboard manufacturers began to experiment with computerised shaping machines, and they found that by creating a master blank of a shape that rode especially well, taking measurements from it, and feeding these into a computer-driven foam cutting machine, they could produce clone boards that required little hand finishing. This represented a large saving in labour, and, as the price of shaping machines dropped, major boardmakers bought their own.
This threat to the handmade-surfboard industry was driven in part by professional surfers - their boards, the lightest, thinnest, most highly refined in use, are delicate and essentially disposable items. Because they ride their boards hard and take big chances in powerful waves, in the course of a season professional riders may break any number of boards. Because they do not want to adjust to a handmade board's quirks every time they jump on a new one, they quickly embraced the new technology.
Inevitably, production shifted to Asia, where labour was cheap, health and safety standards low, and environmental safeguards a thing of the future. Today, boards are produced by the container load using automated systems in China and Thailand by people who have never surfed.
A typical consumable is relentlessly anonymous, detached from its designers and its producers. With all mass-produced goods, the buyer does not have a clue who or what produced an item, nor any idea of how they are made. A bespoke board is an antidote to the sameness and predictability of mass-produced objects. The decision to have a board made by hand is a statement about mass production, individuality, and anonymity.
The owner of a handmade board has a tangible personal association with his or her board, not only through the individual way it looks and feels but also through the shadow presence of the shaper. In some cases handmade objects – pottery for example – the fingerprints of the maker are literally impressed on the object; in others, such as bespoke surfboards, evidence of the maker survives only as careful workmanship and the ideas embodied in it. A handmade board links the owner to the mana of the shaper.
Some mass-produced boards have the look, if not the reality, of the handmade in an attempt to 'design for emotion' and tap into consumer desire for personal connection with their purchase.
A handmade board also links the rider to the past. The surfboard has a long and storied history. Australians Bob McTavish, Wayne Lynch, and Simon Anderson, Californians Mike Hynson and Al Merrick, and Hawaiians Ben Aipa, Dick Brewer, Gerry Lopez, and George Downing are just a few of the great shapers and free-thinking innovators who helped make surfing what it is today. Surfboard shapers are an important way of keeping the sport connected to its history, its legacy of self reliance and community – its soul.
"No matter how far surfing strays into mass consciousness, it's always going to have this grass roots background. We still haven't shaken off the last great boom in design and materials. We're still using WWII aeroplane technology and still measure in feet and inches. We still have crazy names for the moves made up in the 1960s. We have a proud heritage for sure. It's a timelessness. People can reflect on it. There's a healthy respect there for the forefathers of surfing. As the world gets more crowded and the waves get busier and everything gets globalised, I think there is a yearning for the old values that you can cling on to. People want that connection," says Jay.
Part of this yearning is reflected in the trend towards a retro look in modern boards. In the early days of New Zealand surfing, shapers, eager for the latest design ideas, used to devour magazines from overseas. Now Jay uses a stack of 60s, 70s and 80s surfing magazines to travel back in time for ideas that will strike a chord with his customers in their quest to connect with the roots of their sport.
