A little less than three years ago, I purchased two Clark Foam polyurethane surfboard blanks, a couple gallons of polyester of resin and a dozen yards of fiberglass cloth and decided to try my hand at shaping a surfboard. Coincidentally, a month after I got my blanks, Gordon “Grubby” Clark shut down production at his Laguna Nigel, CA manufacturing facility and went out of business, sending the surf world into a vortex of panic, rumor and fear that now, nearly three years removed, seems kind of silly. The world did not end, the price of surfboards did not go through the roof (some larger manufacturers, like Rusty, got egg on their faces for exorbitant price hikes) and relatively few of the smaller shapers (who form the backbone of American surfboard culture and had the most to fear from the shutdown) went out of business. In fact, one of the few predictions arising out of the “Blank Monday” hysteria that seems to have come to pass is that the flood of poorly constructed, mass-produced, inexpensive surfboards built overseas in Thailand, Vietnam and China, will continue unabated. Thankfully, and perhaps in spite of the rise of the popout and the demise of Clark Foam, it seems that many smaller, independent shapers are flourishing. We should all hope for the continued success of the independent shaper, for these craftsmen are our sole connection to a tradition that is an essential part of the ride. So here then, are some random thoughts on building boards, on globalization and on why I like Grubby Clark.

Let’s get one thing out in the open. I’m little more than a dilettante, an observer turned participant. Before I bought my blanks, the sum of my experience building surfboards amounted to a half-assed attempt at a windsurfer when I was in college in the early ‘90’s, a couple hours helping a friend glass his garage-shaped twin fin, and some ding repair. I do not profess to have any knowledge to impart beyond my thoughts. Take them as you will. What you won’t find here are pearls of wisdom or any instructions on how things should be done. I offer my two cents on an issue I think all surfers should care about, which is about all any of this is worth.

THE CORE
Clark’s blanks are a good place to start. It is hard to understate the impact Clark had on the business of board building in the United States, where he owned between 80 and 90 percent of the market for foam blanks. He was there at the beginning, pre-Gidget and, together with Hobie Alter, saw the future of surfboards in polyurethane foam. Over the years, Clark transformed shaping through research and constant innovation. One tired trope people trot out again and again is that surfboard design is stagnant, that it hasn’t changed much since Simon Anderson “invented” the thruster. Some people blame this supposed stagnation on Clark, who, they say, essentially forced manufacturers to use his product. This is, of course, nonsense. In fact, not only is basic design flourishing right now, but shapers are experimenting with new materials (both for foam and for glassing) at a rate that is incomparable to almost any other moment in the history of surfboard design. It is easy to attribute this to the closure of Clark Foam, but to do so ignores his many contributions to the world of surfboard design.

Perhaps his greatest contribution came in the development of “close-tolerance” blanks, but that is just one of many. He created a foam formula which produced easy-to-shape blanks of remarkable consistency. He offered blanks of varying density and weight for different uses. He built concrete molds to specs given to him by shapers, so that the blanks, rather than being shapeless blocks of foam, had specific rockers, width and thickness built into them. In short, he may have been a ruthless competitor (the stories are legion) but his monopoly was built, at least partially, on the strength of his product.

One result of Clark’s innovation was that shapers could finish boards more quickly. Additionally, he could (and did) provide custom rockers to an individual or hundreds of identical blanks to a mass-production outfit. He was a businessman, and quickly cornered the market on foam blanks. Interestingly, however, his monopoly served, in many ways, to keep the cost of foam down, especially for smaller shapers. A year before Clark shut down, Dave Parmenter, a masterful shaper and the conscience of the industry, lauded Clark in his famous “manifesto” because, as he put it: “I am far from being their best or biggest customer (I purchase a mere 300-400 blanks a year) and yet I have never been treated - by each and every employee of Clark Foam - as anything less than a trusted and valued partner. Questions are answered cheerfully, orders processed with speed and accuracy, and the blanks have always been of unbelievable quality.”

Indeed, as the industry changed and big name American shaping outfits grew larger and larger, Clark faced increasing pressure to offer them discounted rates. This would have driven boutique shapers like Parmenter out of business by forcing them to raise prices to compete with the bigger shapers, who would have gotten their blanks at a discount. Whatever your view of his business practices, Grubby never let that happen, and has to be considered at least partially responsible for the long term survival of the cornerstone of innovation in surfboard design, the backyard professional.

His catalog was a who’s who of the American shaping landscape: he offered blanks from 5’5” to 12’8” designed by everyone from Dick Brewer to Dale Velzy to Pat Rawson for every conceivable type of board. For my blanks, I chose an 8’6R and a 10’1Y, designed by Rusty Preisensdorfer and Renny Yater, respectively. I am a surfer of insubstantial ability and substantial size, so I knew, at a minimum, I wanted to have ample foam at my disposal. With the 8’6”, I wanted to replicate a Rusty Desert Island I’d owned and broken in the shore break at Long Beach, NY. The 10’2” was put in the rafters for later.

JUST BUILD IT
With my blanks, resin and cloth in the garage, I studied up on shaping by perusing the web, particularly the shaping and design bulletin board Swaylock's, which is a treasure trove of free information for the first-timer. I read everything I could put my hands on. I watched shaping videos by John Carper and Jim "the Genius" Phillips over and over again. I went to the hard ware store for a sander/grinder, surform, block and hobby planes, sandpaper, gloves, glue and a seemingly endless list of things you'll need if you want to do this. Finally I went out to the garage, built some racks and got to it on my first board.

A couple of tips right off the bat. Make sure your template is good, and by good, I mean not lopsided and bumpy. My first template? Not so good. Dishwasher boxes do not make good templates. I traced out the shape onto the bottom of the blank and cut along the line with a hand saw. My delusions of grandeur (oh, I'll just "recreate" that Rusty I liked so much) were revealed as I looked down at an asymmetrical disaster I'd just made out of one of the last of the Clark foam blanks. Had I put it on eBay the month after I got it, I might have been able to sell it for twice what I paid, instead, I'd turned it into my own little geometry experiment.

Everything in surfing is about curves. From the curve of a swell as it travels across the ocean, to the curve of a set as it appears on the horizon, to the curve of the wave as it hits the bottom and rises up and lifts the surfer, who rides the face and turns in curving arcs. Surfboards are a series of connected curves. The longitudinal rocker, the thickness and foil in the nose and tail and the curve of the rails all need to be continuous, connected curves. I, like most first time shapers, I suspect, was not able to achieve a continuous curve on my rails. So I spent a lot of time trying to bring the bumps in the rail down with my surform and fruitlessly searching for elusive symmetry.

Jim Phillips, in his "Master Shaper" video, calls the surform a crutch tool, and he's right. I shaped my first board entirely with a surform, and it shows. I’m a busy guy, with a demanding job and two small kids, so I worked out in my garage at night after work, a few hours here and there. Over the course of a month or so, I got the board into a state that I thought was passable and got ready to glass. Of course, by this point, it was too cold to glass. Polyester resin will not properly catalyze below a certain temperature, so I waited until spring to discover that the real work in surfboard building lies in the glassing.

If shaping is a geometry experiment, glassing is chemistry. The toxicity of the surfboard manufacturing industry is well documented, and I won't waste time here explaining why. Suffice it to say that that nearly everything used in making surfboards, from the foam, to the resin, the catalyst, the fiberglass, all the cleaners (like acetone), the silica-based buffing compounds to polish with, is in some way harmful to humans. Increasing pressure from OSHA and the threat of civil liability (whether real or imagined by Clark) from workers made ill from manufacturing his blanks, whether real or imagined, are just two of the reasons Grubby Clark gave for closing shop in the long, rambling letter he sent to his customers on Monday, December 5, 2005. Anybody who plans on glassing a board should spend some time familiarizing him or herself with the precautions and dangers of board construction. Be sure you have plenty of rubber gloves and keep the stuff off your skin and, especially, out of your mouth and eyes. Glassing is messy, it is toxic and it is dangerous. It is also fun.

There is something fascinating about the interplay of methyl ethyl ketone peroxide and polyester resin. You can witness the transformation from liquid resin to solid in a matter of minutes. Don't watch for too long though, because as you’re standing there amazed, your resin, mixed with catalyst, is hardening. Its an amazing thing. You drape a long sheet of fiberglass (or two, if your glassing your deck), pour a bucket catalyzed resin, which is about the same consistency of motor oil over the cloth and foam and spread it out over the surface with a rubber squeegee to saturate the cloth. It all seems pretty easy until the resin goes running off the rails in long drips. You then need to fold, or lap, the cloth over the rails. This becomes really difficult at the nose and tail of the board, where the cloth can begin to bunch in large, gooey patches as the resin hardens.

For somebody who has only worked with resin in small batches for ding repair, the transition to using quarts at a time is overwhelming. With my first board, I left way too much cloth at the edges and it hardened in unsightly clumps, which required no small amount of chopping, trimming and sanding when my lamination coat had cured. After laminating the board, all of the bumps, stray fibers and laps of cloth must be knocked down with your surform and a block sander so that the "hotcoat" of sanding resin can be applied to the laminated board. Sanding resin is just laminating resin with a wax additive that can be sanded and polished when fully cured, whereas, without the additive, it stays slightly tacky. After sanding the hotcoat with my variable speed sander/grinder, using a progressively finer grind sandpaper up to 400 wet, I added a gloss coat, which is really just a cosmetic thing that allows you to bring the board to a high polish with wet sanding and buffing compounds. Somewhere between the start of glassing and the end of sanding was the point in the process at which my garage turned from a science lab to a Superfund site. Sanding leaves a very fine layer of fiberglass dust over everything. I can't emphasize enough the need for anybody who plans on doing this to adhere to proper safety precautions. To this end, I removed all the kid's bikes and basically any thing I didn't want covered in fiberglass dust from the garage. I also draped plastic sheeting off the ceiling and the walls to trap the dust in one side of the garage. If I continue shaping, and I reckon I will, since I'm hooked, I plan on framing up a wall to seal off a space in the back of the garage. I figure I could make a space about 6'x14', which is all I really need.

I won't talk about installing fins too much, because there are so many different systems now, whether you glass your fins on, or decide to go with any of the numerous modular, removable designs. Briefly, I went with Futures boxes, which I installed with the help of the inimitable Bryce Nihill, who has been a sage and calming influence on me throughout the steep learning curve (I'm prone to the unnecessary freak out). Futures sells an installation jig with a router that makes installing their boxes, whether before or after you've glassed the board, a snap. Properly placing the boxes on the hull of your board, in order to assure the proper performance of the board, well, that's not such a snap. Especially when your rails are about as symmetrical as an abstract sculpture.

With my fins in, the board glossed an polished, I was the proud owner of a typical first board; a cockeyed, uneven, 8'6" round pin "fun gun." For my first go out, I enjoyed chopped up storm surf in the chest high range and was surprised by the way the board felt, fast and true, racing down the face and finding the pocket with ease. I could feel the water hum over my fins, placed as they were, at an odd angle to the rail. I felt connected to the wave in an incredibly honest way. I felt proud of myself.

Hooked now, but acutely aware of all the mistakes I'd made, I knew I could do better. So I set about scheming and planning for my 10'2". Again, I turned to Bryce for help. One of the biggest mistakes I made on the 8'6", was in the template. For the longboard, instead of a dishwasher box, we used Adobe Illustrator and printed the outline of a round nosed, rockered out round pin with narrow hips. I wanted a lot of thickness through the middle third, but with a foiled nose and tail. The Clark 10'2"Y, designed by Santa Barbara shaper and point break stylist Rennie Yater, does not make the greatest nose rider. Which is OK, because at 6'7" tall and 265 pounds, I don't do a lot of nimble prancing up to the nose. My style, such as it is, doesn't make one think Joel Tudor. Think Kurt Rambis, if he surfed. The stock 10'2 blank has over five inches of rocker in the nose, so I figured I'd go for a sleek longboard I could ride in the lined up point surf near my parents' home in Rhode Island and practice shuffling my size 15 gorilla feet around the deck and making sections.

We printed the template out in pages and tiled them together with scotch tape, then taped the paper to the deck of the board, using the outside edge of the stringer as a guide and traced the outline with a pencil. Just as I had with my first board, I cut the outline with a hand saw, but this time, the rails were much closer to the desired continuous curve. I smoothed out the edges with a tool I made for that purpose and got ready to skin the blank. This time, I would use Bryce's Hitachi power planer, specially modified for mowing foam. It was in using the planer that I came to realize what Phillips meant when he talked about the surform as a crutch. What took me days with a hand plane and surform on my first board, I did in minutes with the planer. And instead of a bumpy surface that required night after night of constant scraping, I had an even hull and deck ready for fine tuning in an hour. Again, I'd timed my shaping poorly, and winter came again, making glassing impossible without a heated space to do it in.

Late fall in the Northeast is like the magic hour, so on those day when surf arrives, you'd rather surf than glass or sand. October turned to November, turned to Winter, and my longboard sat on the racks in my garage, waiting to be glassed. Bryce, coming through again, decided to remodel his basement. With his wife out of town for 48 hours and having a 6'6" channel quad to glass for himself, Bryce made the executive decision to use his basement, gutted and ready for renovation, as a glassing factory for the weekend. So I threw my shaped board in my van, went to his house, and in one long day, we laminated and hotcoated both boards. We experimented with tints, getting a beautiful two-toned green cutlap design on my longboard and doing a straight white tint on his 6'6". I learned more about building surfboards in that one day, than I did building the first one by myself. Having somebody who knows what he's doing assist you go a long way toward making a better board. For the fin, I went decidedly low tech, and put in the ten inch fin box five inches up from the tail by marking out the box on the hull and cutting through the glass with a ruler and utility knife. Then, I took down the stringer and the foam with a chisel until the space was slightly bigger than the fin box. Finally, I measured a square of cloth, cut in four vents and set the box into the hole, which I had filled with a slow batch of sanding resin. Voila.

Between family and work and all of the bullshit those of us who haven't given ourselves completely over to this thing we love suffer through, it was late spring before I finally had the board fine sanded and pinlined and ready for its gloss coat. I felt pretty good about myself. The board looked great, felt great under my arm and I was relishing those final steps of gloss and polish. I put an orange pinline with a smaller green pinline on the deck with paint pens and two small floral stencils with the green paint pen near the nose and tail. The board looked great. But, here's a tip: don't use the DecoColor brand paint pens from your daughter's crayon case to do the skinny green pins on your newly shaped log, especially if your are putting on a gloss coat. Why? Well, I don't know the science behind it (but like I said, it's chemistry), apparently whatever is in that paint is soluble in polyester resin. I did the orange pin with a Posca pen and the green with the Deco pen. They looked terrific, so I went ahead and put on the gloss coat (the pinlines and stencils were totally dry, done the previous weekend). While brushing on the gloss coat, I noticed the green starting to run a bit. Oh well, I thought, too bad. As the paint started to run, especially on the stencils, the lines blurred and I actually thought it looked kind of cool. A happy accident, if you will. However, it was kind of chilly and I was down to the end of my catalyst, so the resin went off cool and slow, with 1% pv instead of what I should have set it off at, closer to 1.75% pv. What does that mean? It means that when I went out to look at my handiwork the next morning, the slow-setting resin had basically lifted all of the soluble green pigment off the deck and run off the rails with the excess resin, leaving almost no green pinline at all and two big green blobs on the deck. Bummer. I couldn't be bothered to sand it down and try again, so I call the board the "grass stain."

For my first go out on the log, I took it to Long Beach and surfed typically gutless early June wind swell in the knee high range. Ironically, I was met in the lineup by Mike Machemer, a friend and lifetime Long Beach local who grew up in nearby Rockville Center. It was an overcast morning and the water was still cold. In the quiet of the dawn, the sound of the chop slapping on the hull of the big board was musical, rhythmic. The board paddled like a dream and slid into the small waves slowly, but as gravity took over and the fin set and the rail stretched out along the face, I knew that the board was good. Mike had a few slides and reported that the board felt good on the rail. I’m sure I was beaming.

Mike had also been shaping over the winter crafting a beautiful diamond tail single out of a 7'3" Rawson blank. He'd gotten the template for a diamond tail single fin from Parmenter, through a connection with surf bard Andrew Kidman, who was traveling in New York and knew Parmenter through is writing and films. Mike shaped the board with Kidman and Brandon "Chicken" Balabus' shed, the "Chicken Coop." This was right around the time I was shaping the grassstain. Mike had recently partnered with his friend, Chris Gentile (a board head if ever there was one) in opening a New York satellite of the Mother Ship of modern surfcraft artistry, Mollusk Surf Shop of San Francisco. In fact, he opened the shop in the same space we had looked at in a Williamsburg warehouse to see about turning into a shaping and glassing space. Instead, the space is now a bona fide surf shop, filled with beautifully built boards of various, eclectic styles, from stubby, twin keeled Chris Christenson twin keeled fish to sleek Mandala quads, Dan-O noseriders to Pearson Arrow thrusters. Why am I telling you all this? Well, in a way, Mollusk NYC, is what brings me to my plea, of sorts.

KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY
After the Clark shutdown, speculation about what would happen to the industry was rampant. Shapers had to scramble to get foam. Because Clark's position in the U.S. foam market was so dominant, basically all of the new from was from unknown sources, some of it of dubious quality. The market abhors a vacuum, though, and sure enough, enterprising entrepreneurs moved in to supply foam blanks to feed the apparently unceasing demand for new surfboards. Just as he had accurately predicted the rise of the offshore, factory-shaped kookstick in his manifesto, Parmenter was right on again when he discussed the fallout of the end of Clark Foam: "It is probable that when the dust settles we will see a stratification of the various surfboard constructions, each supporting the three main categories of board buyer: The entry-level Sunday surfer, who looks primarily for generic shapes with low cost and durability; the connoisseur, who seeks out fashionable labels and cosmetic qualities; and the performance surfer, who cares only about shape and design. With the performance surfers, I predict, we will likely see a substantial exodus toward EPS/epoxy boards.” Parmenter, while spot-on with all three of his predictions, has now capitulated to the demands of the market and is mass-producing his stand up paddle boards overseas in EPS composite sandwich under the Boardworks label. He's been pilloried (unfairly in my view) on Swaylock's and other bulletin boards, as a sell-out and hypocrite. From what I've read, it seems his decision to go to that route, to give up, essentially, on the position he'd staked so eloquently in his manifesto, was as much an acceptance of the benefits of the technology (especially when applied to paddleboards) behind the so-called compsand boards, as much as it was a financial sellout. Of course, pictures of Jennifer Garner and other celebs practicing the hottest new surf fad probably hasn't hurt the bottom line.

But really, all that is irrelevant. The fact is, Parmenter is a surfer who still shapes hundreds of boards a year by hand, filling custom orders from surfers in the know who want to buy a board from somebody who surfs and don't mind paying a little more for it. And that's the thing, isn't it? Shouldn't we buy surfboards made by surfers? A few weeks ago I was at a party in Rockaway Beach arguing with a guy I know in passing, a decent surfer and lifelong Rockaway local. He was trying to justify to me the business of a local shop owner, who for the last ten years or so has been flooding the market with cheap, foreign made boards under long defunct, classic labels, including Plastic Fantastic, Canyon, Challenger and others. Apparently the new batch were top notch. I wanted to yell and scream. This is a guy with an incredible quiver; boards of every vintage, size and shape.

What do you say to someone like that? To a certain degree, I guess its just an inevitable part of our society that economics is the engine. I mean, Grubby Clark amassed a fortune making the manufacture of surfboards streamlined and easier by developing a better blank. This isn't even the first wave of popouts. Throughout the Sixties, you could buy them in sporting goods stores. Shit, I own one from each generation. A 9'8" Dextra D-fin circa '64 and a Plastic Fantastic made in China and purchased from said local shop owner before I knew any better. In fact, when I asked the kid in the shop about the board, if it was "the" Plastic Fantastic (the first board I ever stood up on was an early '70s downrailed, swallow tail, single fin Plastic Fantastic), he said it was. The unwillingness to admit to what is being done; the appeal to nostalgia by using defunct labels to sell an inferior product, seems to be a separate and distinct issue from Parmenter’s 180-degree turn on the composite technology. Now, Jan and Dean have given way to the Blue Crush generation and the population of people taking to the water to catch a wave seems to grow unrelentingly. Maybe there is a place in the market for the popouts. The latest survey from SIMA (Surf Industry Manufacturers of America) indicates that, in 2006, just about 70% of the boards sold in the U.S. were made in the U.S. and that approximately 75% of all boards sold in the U.S. were of traditional polyurethane/polyester construction. To a certain degree, many of the new surfers won't ever think of their surfboard any differently than they do their tennis rackets or golf clubs.

My plea is that we, those of us who care about this thing that we're obsessed with (and surfers are, without fail, the most obsessed people I know), don't let that happen. Surfboards aren't tennis rackets. They are the essence of what remains of this culture, which, like everything else, is getting more homogeneous every day. The history of the surfboard is the history of surfing and we need to see that the people who surf, and who make surfboards, don't get marginalized. If I learned anything building those two boards, it is that we ought to appreciate and support those of us who make it possible to enjoy the ride. If you've read this far, I'm probably preaching to the converted. And maybe I'm a hypocrite, too. I mean, here I am on the one hand defending Parmenter's move into the macro-industry overseas while at the same time arguing that people shouldn't buy cheaper overseas polyester boards.

The point is, let's not abandon them. As bleak as things may seem (and any summer Sunday in Rockaway or Long Beach, or shit, just about anywhere around here, can be packed to the gills with first-timers on kooksticks and pretty fucking bleak) I think there's reasons to be optimistic. For as accurate as Parmenter was about the proliferation of "the entry-level Sunday surfer, who looks primarily for generic shapes with low cost and durability," he also realized that the market for high-quality, durable and aesthetic boards can and must endure, for it is there that the tradition of board building will survive in this country. The Sunday surfers on their popouts are to surfing what I am to shaping. Dilettantes and passersby; and they won't sustain the vital connection between the board and the ride. That's up to us. Don't feed the machine by buying the knockoffs. I'm gonna take that "Plastic Fantastic" and I'm gonna strip off all the glass off it and shape myself something I can connect to. If you can't do that, buy a surfboard made by a surfer.

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