Shaping

NEW!   Look out for our new shaping service in France coming in September. A state-of-the-art machine, a shaping room, and the best foam you will ever work with – US Blanks “2” second generation foam.

Save over 5€ on every blank and get the machine to do the rest. Use our new dedicated shaping room for as long as you like. The best foam, a pre-shape waiting for you, and your own space to finese your surfboards.

We keep a shaping room in our new smaller UK factory. Like most its painted blue. Its got a 12′ high ceiling, unlike most. Lit from the sides and above to cast shadows on white foam, its warm, its organised, its clean and full of shaping toys, tools, and templates; a cave of shaping delight.

Its inhabited. Shapers’ slowly go mad there; all that blue, all that foam, the lights, the lights! We encourage them out to eat and re-balance. They stumble, blink, stretch, refuel, hang out a bit, but always go back; a committed, fussy, particularly unique breed of craftsmen that live for the love of surfboards.

We’ve seen scores of shapers pass through. One of them, somehow, lodged in-house; a professor of shaping technology – a doctor of foam dust. He works and fettles our cad-cam shaping machine. He design files, correcting and nitpicking the input so that every shape, because one in a hundred goes wrong, comes out of the machine to an accuracy of 1 mm in a metre.

Phil Hodge, professor Hodge, is our designer and shaper working from cad-cam to machine to hand with nothing in between. Shapers live in our blue room by choice, while we ready their care for later.

The shaping process after the machine is pure finessing. Hand finishing is the subtler part of the process, finickling in the edges, the rails, the bottom shapes and concaves and vees. The honed techniques from decades of blue-room bathing result in a product so innately beautiful – those white porcelain curves – its going to be a shame to clothe it. This shaper will want to keep those curves for a long as possible with exercise, with care, with food from the barrels of blue and white manna.

Shaping is a skill and a pleasure – never a chore – and we cherish those who do it for the love of the art. We respect and remember them, as we eventually intern them in their rest homes – painted blue naturally.