Homesick

Something else I do besides making surfboards is make art. My good friend Joaquin Trujillo was kind enough to ask me to be a part of a group show he is curating called Homesick. It’s going to be at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard and opening night is Saturday December 12th. So if anyone has the time they could get in a session at Point Mugu and then see some great art that night.  For more info see this: trujillopaumier.com/homesick/

Mitch Stick

This is recently finished board # 2 for Mitch Coleborn. Ryan Thomas let Mitch try out his 5′6″ RT Openface when he was here in the U.S. a few months back. He surfed it at Newport and liked it so much that he ended up ordering one. We made it an inch shorter and a 1/2″ narrower in the nose , width, and tail. I took the volume down in the rail as well, but it ended up being a little too much. So this is the second go around and hopefully he gives it a thumbs up. I’m pretty stoked and honored to have a surfer of this caliber feel the need to pony up the dough for one of my boards. Thanks Mitch! For some footage, check out Ryan’s stupendous new film BS!

Joe’s Quad

This is a 7′4″ quad built for a guy named Joe who works next door to me. It has a relatively beefy foil, as Joe is a bigger guy. He used to play pro football in fact. It’s made with handmilled poplar, balsa and poplar rails, and has handmade birch ply FCS fins with the new Fusion system. Joe’s  planning on traveling with it, so he opted for the fin system. As a side note, Joe gave me a tour of his shop where he restores WWII era bomber engines. The level of difficulty of what he does is mind boggling. Imagine trying to restore an engine the size of your living room and with 21 cylinders to boot. It sort of makes what I do look like child’s play.

Surf Trip!

I always love it when customers come back to tell me how their boards worked for them.  Even better when they bring photographic evidence.  These are some recent photos of a customer named Breen riding his 5′5″ quad in Fiji. The board was actually Ryan Thomas’ originally. It’s an early flextail experiment that didn’t have enough flex for Ryan. We brought it down to Cardiff for Anything But Three and accidentally left to go home while someone was still out in the water trying it out! Doh! Upon returning to the beach to hopefully retrieve it, we were told that this someone had left with it because he knew how to get a hold of me. I figured it was probably gone for good and this guy had just scored a free board.  But sure enough the guy, who turned out to be Breen,  called me a couple days later and even offered to buy it. It’s nice to know there’s honest people in the world still. Anyway, that was over 2 years ago and he still favors this board. I’m glad to see it’s going to good use. I think he’s taking it to Chile next. Can’t wait to see those photos. Thanks Breen!

Flex Hull

This hull is 6′4″ and has very foiled rails.  Since the board is so bladed out I was able the bring the wood paneling all the way to the edge and leave off  the wood strips on the rails. This combined with the R.T. Openface method increased the boards flex. Normally I can’t get away with this because the wood is too thick to bend around the compund curve of the rail. You can only achieve that with really thin veeners as with Surftechs for example. Really thin veeners though don’t do anything for performance, as it’s basically like laminating shelving paper to your board. Instead of the ride being lively and springy it’s has a dull thud and slap against the water. Hulls are supposed to have a bit of flex in them, which is why the best of them such as Liddles are glassed so light and have thin 1/16″ cedar stringers.  This is also why they unfortunatly get beat up so fast. The rail less method, combined with EPS foam, a wood deck and custom epoxy glassing enhances this flex characteristic without the worry of the board going ‘dead’ or dinging if you look at it wrong.  The stringer has been spread over the whole board so it won’t get flexed out and the deck is way stronger to boot. No more mushy hull syndrome. This particular board is avaliable at Wetsand in Ventura.

Showhull

This is a new 6′4″ hull I took up to Sacred Craft in Ventura. It’s made with the R.T. Openface construction for extra flex and spring, same as the Lil Macho board I posted.  Sam George took a liking to this at the show and commented on how it combined the old with the new. That pretty much summed up what I try to do with my boards. Striving to build a better board using common materials, instead of expensive and unsustainable man made exotics. Thanks to my good friend Church for picking this board up. Enjoy!

Fat and Finless

This is my newest alaia. It’s made using the openface method, with a 1lb. EPS core, 1/2″ thick 2lb. EPS bottom sheet, and 1/16″ handmilled poplar deck. It’s glassed with 4 oz. cloth and epoxy. Dimensions are 7′0″x 18″x 2 1/4″.  I’ve been having people ask if I could build an alaia that was more bouyant and would paddle easier, so this board has been running through my mind for a while now. I knew the straight outline and thin rails of alaias help with setting an edge and trimming, so I had to encorporate that into the shape. I ended up going with a peanut type outline similar to the ones Jon Wegener is making, as that template seems to be magic. I made it a little wider and added about an inch of rocker to compensate for the boards added stiffness. It had the same single concave and 1/4″ roll off the rail as the regular alaias and a hard edge almost the full length of the board. The ride at first was a little more slipery then a traditional alaia because it skimmed more on top of the water instead of settling in. I had to stay centered and on top of the board so it didn’t get away from me. Once I figured that out it felt pretty natural. It was really fast and smooth and still had a similar feel to a traditional alaia. My friend Graham, who hadn’t had a lot of experience on alaias, even caught a wave on it and went backside all the way to the sand. And that was on probably the fourth wave he tried it on. Also, this was on a day when the waves were small and pretty bad, but the board was just flying.  Basically this board was super fun and I’m pretty excited about it’s possibilities.

Alaia Round Tail Coming Full Circle

I made a Alaia recently for a customer who wanted a round tail. I wasn’t sure how it was going to work , but he wanted to try it. As I was making it, I was reminded of an article in The Surfers Journal, vol.15 issue 5 called Aloha Washington. The article describes the formation of a logging camp spearheaded by Ralph Emerson and Wilfred Dole (of the pineapple family).  Dole, being raised in Hawaii  was an avid surfer and knew how to build boards. So he built some, similar to the one’s he was using in the islands and he and Ralph surfed them in Washington. All of this happened around 1902, before George Freeth and it got me thinking, maybe this shape is a lost branch of alaia design.

fish slaps

Could be a handplane for bodysurfing, could be footwear. This handplane is made out of the scraps of paulownia left over from making alaias. Erin at Shelter Surf Shop prompted me to make these. I thought it was a pretty good idea, as the wood is so light and corky it feels like you hardly have anything strapped onto your hand. I’ll have one of these along with some other boards at the Thalia Surf/ Insight demo day this friday May 8th.

Water Shoe for a Lead Foot

This quad was recently made for a local surfer named Andrew, who had brought several of his boards to me in the past for repair. He had caved in the decks of all of them. He’s a pretty heavy footed surfer and so he wanted something more durable. He figured the extra money spent on a wood board would be offset by not having to shell out cash for repeated repairs. The poplar deck should help keep this board in the water and not back in the shop. The shape is a copy of one of his favorite boards, made by Erik Olson.