When I hung up the phone with Mick Becker after discussing his Natures Shapes label, I kept thinking about one thing he said, “You have to be able to build any board on any day.” I found it to be somewhat of an existential strategy on board building that may also, indirectly, address the notion of a quiver and how one must be prepared to ride any wave on any day. It speaks to an ability to diversify, to be flexible and open, not just in surfing but in life. For almost 15 years Becks has been doing this with his surfboards, whether experimenting with new materials or new designs, all the while balancing a day job as a teacher.

This interview was conducted one afternoon in early March while Becks was on his way to the silk-screener to verify artwork.

MM: How was Costa Rica last week?
MB: Good, I was down in Nosara with my wife doing the old man’s trip (laughs). But I brought 3 boards with me: a 6’0”x 19 3/4" x 2 3/8" bat tail quad; a 6’2” x 18 5/8" x 2 1/4"; EPS shortboard and a 9’0” x 22 5/8" x 2 3/4" diamond tail longboard (Hp1 Model).

You grew up on Long Island, no? When did you start surfing and shaping?
I grew up in Oakdale and started surfing in seventh grade at Sailors Haven on Fire Island. Started shaping in tenth grade, about 1993. I would pull the glass off of old boards and reshape them. After selling a few, I purchased some Clark foam blanks, which I shaped without a planer, and sanded them by hand. But by the end of that batch I had enough money to purchase a planer and electric sander. After doing about 20 boards I went over to work at Phoenix Surfboards with Squeak. He’s a great person who taught me how to sand, polish and gave me a lot of tricks. However, he didn’t teach me how to shape.

You’re a teacher as well as a shaper?
Yes, I teach technology at East Moriches Middle School. Once I realized I could shape at night and have someone come in during the day to sand or cleanup, I could do boards and teach at the same time. It’s hard to make a living building surfboards and I need the benefits and income of a full-time day job. But I also like working with kids and enjoy teaching them to work with tools. We build skateboards, Adirondack chairs, radio-controlled boats and all sorts of fun stuff. It’s a job where I get out at 3 o’clock and then go work on boards all night long, whereas if I did construction and got out at 5 o’clock everyday after lifting heavy stuff I’d be too shot to work on boards at night.

Are you working five nights a week in the shaping room?
Pretty much and I work on the weekends. I hardly ever go out to happy hour but I’ll go out to dinner with my wife and then bring her home and be like, ‘I’m going back’ and she goes, ‘I know’ and I’ll end up going back to shape until 10 or 11 o’clock at night.

You’re no longer working out of the house?
Well, I shape out of my house but also have a shaping room at our new factory.

What’s the deal with the new factory?
The new factory is in Sayville and it’s basically an old industrial building that came up for sale and I’m in the process of buying it. I always wanted to get a place and not have to work out of the backyard anymore.

Why’s that?
Working out of the backyard has been great but at the same time you can only do so many boards. And we seem to be growing to the point where I need to be doing stand-up paddle boards which are really big but more importantly, going through the winter trying to heat a small area is just really rough, especially on Mark (Petrocelli) when he’s sanding and hot-coating. I knew I had to get a bigger place and didn’t want to rent a place in an industrial park, so I found this building right on the tracks in Sayville. There’s a fence guy and a garage door company around me so it’s industrial but also close to town. Perfect for what we do. We’re going to have a showroom in the front. I don’t like calling it ‘a store,’ and I'm trying not to because then all the other stores are going to be pissed at me (laughs).

But the thing has always been to have a core place where we had boards and some accessories, our own shirts, hats, and sunglasses. But keep it core! A place where people can see their boards being built right there and then see the board turn up in the showroom in a few weeks time. Plus, some guys are ‘off the rack’ guys; they have to buy a board off the rack. They don’t know exactly what they want and need to see it first. This way if I have six 6’4”’s on the rack they can look at them all and say, ‘Hey, I like this one’ or ‘Hey, can you make me this one but thin the rail out a little bit.’

How many boards are you doing a year?
We did about 230 boards in 2006, but this year we’ll blow that away. We’ll probably do close to 350.

And how many people do you have working for you now?
Right now I have Mark Petrocelli and Eddie Fawess who’s been laminating for us.

Old school tube-riding legend, Ed Fawess?
Yep. Ed has glassed surfboards since the 60’s and is in the East Coast Hall of Fame of Surfing for his glassing and surfing. I always did the glassing and still do some, but because we have a factory Ed’s now able to come in and work as much as he wants. Plus, it’s really close to his factory where he builds marble for sinks and corian countertops. He comes in and glasses for me but still glasses for Squeak too. He’ll work at night and glasses a few, like 4 or 5 a week.

Mark Petrocelli is our main full-time guy and also does Faktion Surfboards, which means ‘a part of a larger group;’ and he’s part of us, part of Cannibal and part of Bunger. He hotcoats, sands, glosses, pinlines and airbrushes. Then I have another airbrusher, Phil Berger who’s just an awesome artist. He’s been working with me for the past 5 years and can draw your face in such detail it’s insane. He’s our logo guy, our paint pen guy and does all the …Lost type artwork. Then I usually have another guy, another helper, someone I’m training who wants to learn how to work on surfboards.

You take interns?
I do but not to teach shaping necessarily. I just help get them to the point of sanding or hotcoating, basically something where they can come in and make themselves some money.

Speaking of logos, who designed the Natures Shapes one?
The shark was designed by tattoo artist Brad Schneider. Brad used to own part of Phoenix actually, but moved to California to do tattoos.

Can you talk about templates?
Templates are funny because I could take a Matt Kechele template off a stub nose fish 10 years ago, change it 10 times by tweaking it, come up with my own version and then re-template it. We have a few old school fish templates and bat-tail quad ones, but basically our shortboard template has been evolving from a shorboard template we had awhile back. You can also make your own curve by bending sticks of wood or pieces of plastic. Especially with stuff that’s weird, where you have to do that, if you can’t find a template that will actually blend the lines together.

Do you have much out-of-state clientele?
We have people from New Jersey. Maryland, and Delaware. We shipped a batch of boards to Japan last year, which was cool. We also do a lot of board for artists who’ll take the boards and paint them or airbrush them themselves and then we’ll glass and polish the boards. Guys in the Hamptons and in the City who use it as a part of their art. Peter Buckman and James Victore recently ordered a few.

Who’s carrying the boards now?
Boarders in Rockaway, Unsound in Long Beach, Main Beach in Wainscott, and Air and Speed in Montauk. We’re going to the NJ Surf Expo on March 10-12th. I’m hoping that I can get some dealers in NJ and New England. Just a couple though, we ’re not trying to make millions of surfboards! Plus, it also gives me an excuse to take a trip and get away for a little while (laughs).

How affected were you by the closure of Clark?
A little bit. We were affected to the point where we were worried like everyone else about which blanks to get, which companies were doing the best blanks, and how all of the sudden the prices went up and it was costing one hundred dollars for a shortboard blank. But it was the middle of the winter when it happened and I’d already taken a trip to Florida to pick up Clark blanks and had a hundred of them in stock. So, if someone said they wanted a poly board at whatever size, I knew we could do it at least until June. I just kept using my Clark inventory. Some people were selling blanks on Ebay but if you sell it on Ebay then what do you buy? You have to buy something from Brazil that you’re not even sure about.

Then we started doing the epoxy thing. I went down to Greg Loehr’s a few years ago and he showed me how to work with epoxy and make our own blanks. But the epoxy thing is a little bit harder to work with. It’s more sensitive to temperature and mixing and everything has to be perfect with epoxy. We did a few batches, got it wired, and still do a bunch now. But that held us over through the winter because a lot of people were interested in trying something new, new technology. And a lot of people like epoxy. For example, if I make a shortboard for myself I’ll make an epoxy. It has a different feel, it’s not a Surftech and doesn’t feel chattery like one. Epoxy feels like it adds more life and more spring to your surfing. More spring in your turns and more of a positive, snappy feeling.

Do you use KKL?
We have a couple of models on the KKL but I shape most of them by hand, otherwise I wouldn’t be coming home at 9 o’clock every night (laughs). By the time you get a board perfect, it takes so much to get a board to a point where everyone who picks it up on the beach says ‘Wow, this board works great.’ Once that happens you might as well put it into the computer because by that time why bother shaping it by hand and trying to get it perfect? I actually had someone come to me and say they didn’t want it off the computer. I said ‘Okay’ and hand-shaped the model he wanted, stood it next to the computer shape and it’s the exact same board anyway. So what’s the difference? Actually, it’s more exact and more precise off the computer.

You still have to hand-shape though. A lot of guys that start off now, if they get one board mapped into the computer at KKL they’ll just keep shaping that board, cleaning the lines off it, and they look like a superstar but don’t really know how to actually shape. So you really have to learn how to shape before you get to the point of using KKL. But like I said, we do a couple of them but most of the stuff we get is custom and unique so you can’t even use the pre-shapes.

I don’t know what you think but I think the computer can be a good thing. Although it’s hard because people say that it takes the ‘soul’ out of shaping, but if you can get the same board twice, scale up, and the board works really well, then why not?

Perfecting it with your hands and then mapping it out on the computer for future reference…
By the time you shape a hundred of that model…

I think that’s a key word, ‘model’ in the sense that it’s a defined entity, a proven design per se. It is what it is and that’s that. But I think a lot of people come to you for something more custom.
But it’s really hard for a custom guy to keep up with a company like Aviso, who make ‘models’ because they’ve got massive tech and we’ve got a really expensive price tag for the carbon fiber, so it’s hard to compete. I’m into trying different things, new things all the time. We’ve done vacuum bagging and we fixed all the Surftech with high-tech materials. I like doing different stuff and making a board go well and be like, ‘Wow, it’s never gone like this before. This is crazy.’ We’ve done epoxy with carbon fiber with polyester over it. Still it’s hard because it’s custom. The Aviso’s could never be custom because they only have models.

But that’s the difference, they just have models. You have both. Like you said earlier, about everyone on the beach trying out a board and developing a model but then still maintaining the ability to tailor it to the individual.
That’s what it is and that’s how it usually happens. Even with our models, we wind up changing them a lot.

What kind of boards are you making lately?
We make a wide range of boards. Years ago I used to build a lot more fun boards, but because of the Chinese thing we don’t make as many. That’s how a shaper sometimes enters the market by building a lot of funshapes because the new guy that’s learning doesn’t care about the label or where it’s made. Luckily we’re now at a level where we build mostly high performance shortboards, high performance longboards, and then the quads, 5-fins and paddleboards.

We make a lot of boards for people who can’t find what they want on the rack, like a hybrid type of board for example. A shop might be full of shortboards and full of longboards but you can’t find a 7’2” pointy nosed swallow-tail. The older guy who’s been surfing for twenty years, knows what he likes, or doesn’t, and can’t find it on the rack. None of it seems to fit his style - the boards are either little potato chips or they’re logs. I find that a lot of the time, the customer comes in and says ‘We need to make something like this’ and then I go through the templates and we draw something up. That usually works out great because the person helps to get exactly what they want.

I know I’m not going to get every fish customer or every retro-longboard customer. I don’t want to specialize, I don’t want to be just a fish guy or a shortboard guy. I want to do everything. We try to do a variety of everything. You have to be able to build any board on any day. I’ll come in some days and have to build a gun, a retro fish, a mini 5’2” shortboard, and a stand-up paddleboard or an epoxy tow-in.

Tow boards for NY?
A couple here and there for some guys out east. Actually, a few summers ago I got towed behind a boat on a hydrofoil. I had one for a little while and we were trying to copy it! But the only problem was the piece of metal was so massive that it’d cost too much to have done by a metal shop. It’s challenging, you’re wearing snowboard boots, which are filling up with water and you’re getting dragged behind a boat! It’s nuts, there’s a piece of metal flying underneath rising up and it weighs like 20 pounds and it just lifts you out of the water.

You mentioned paddleboards earlier?
We’ve been doing a lot of those. I don’t know if it’s just a fad or what, a lot of people think it might be. But a lot of the guys from the Hamptons and Montauk are ordering them. Lars Svanberg from Main Beach has one that he paddles around the point with and does the paddle races on.

What kind of blanks are you using for those?
We’ve been making them out of EPS because with EPS foam you can make anything you want out of it, wave-skis, kayaks, tandems, etc. The block is 17 feet long and we take a hot wire and make our own rocker templates. I took the Clark foam catalogue and took tall the measurements out, scaled them up, put them to the rockers and ended up peeling the Clark foam rocker. That’s how we started doing the epoxies too. Clark used to make a 12’8” that was meant for stand-up paddleboards or tandems. So that’s what we did, copied that 12’8”.

Generally, what are the dims on a stand-up paddleboard?
They can be as short as 9 feet and can go up to 12 feet, but the width is the most important thing. They have to be around 28 or 29 inches wide. That’s why the Surftech Mickey Munoz 12 footer isn’t that great. Even though it’s a bigger board it’s only 26 inches wide and when you try to standup paddle it wobbles too much.

Are you making custom paddles too?
I haven’t gotten into making the paddles. A lot of times people find their own paddles. They usually use a kayak paddle. There’s a paddle that Main Beach and a lot of the stores sell, but it’s pretty expensive, they’re like 300-400 dollars and made out of carbon fiber. Then there’s an inexpensive aluminum paddle, which is what I use. But the carbon fiber ones are lighter, better, and more expensive.

For more information on Mike Becker and Natures Shapes, please visit www.naturesshapes.com.

Slideshow Photos by Adam Cannizzaro

Michael Machemer is a New York surfer, writer, photographer, curator and a frequent contributor to Newyorksurf.com. Michael can be reached at eataknish@newyorksurf.com

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