Is there a difference in what goes on in a shaping room different today than 40 years ago?

In some ways definitely.

One day this week I got to talking with one of the shapers that bring us boards at the lam. shop about the process of board shaping. He’s been making boards for close to forty years so knows what’s happened and the evolution process in surfboards. His name is Malcolm Campbell.

The conversation developed around this weekends Sacred Craft Expo that took place in San Deigo. One of the events was a thing they called The Young Guns of Shaping. The write up went like this….

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Four shapers, each 25-years-old or younger, are given two hours each to shape a surfboard out of a massive 10’10” stringerless chunk of foam. They can shape anything they want. The shapers use their own tools. The finished blanks will then be judged Saturday afternoon by legendary San Diego shaper Rusty Preisendorfer.
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Shaping a surfboard from a big chunk of foam is no easy task. So the four guys really had their work cut out for them. Probably the best approach would be to shape something you were really familiar with, of course, something you knew really well.

The boards you do over and over again are in your head. You should be able to see it in your minds eye from the get go. Look a that piece of foam you’re given, see where the board in your head fits into that piece of foam and hack away until what you’ve seen in your head is cut out of the that piece of foam and right there in front of you.

Simple enough. But, what if the board you wanted to shape you had never seen before? You had an idea of what the board should look like, because it is in your head but in reality it has never been made before. And, since it has never been made before that shape or design in your head has never been ridden before.

Well, about forty years ago that’s exactly what Malcolm did. As well, so did many of the guys that shaped surfboards back in the early evolution days including myself. We saw stuff in our head that we wanted to ride that we thought may allow us to move in places on a wave face that we’d not been able to get to before.

Some of those boards were pretty crude. But, after a couple refinements they came around. We had never seen the stuff we made, we didn’t know for sure what would work well and what we needed to refine. The young guns of shaping in the past had nothing to go on but intuition. The young guns of shaping in the past had not seen anything like what they were making.

The young guns of today? They’ve pretty much seen it all before they ever get started.

D.R.