The ability of the human senses in crafting and making things is truly amazing. We don’t think about this much or take much more than a casual look but, what we are capable of making with our hands is pretty incredible.

I got to talking with Sammy the foreman at the FCD lam shop one day this past week about this very thing. Sammy had been setting fins and was showing me his system for getting the fins set right when I sited one of the boards and mentioned that the trailing fin looked off a touch.

We got to talking about how tricky getting fins set right can be when you’ve got to deal with the minor variations that can show up in the production process. For fins it can be a stringer that isn’t quite in the center of the board or is curved a little in stead of dead straight.

Then we got to talking about machined blanks and how they can be off, like one rail being thicker than the other or the outline not centered. We both agreed that it is easier to shape a board from scratch than to make certain corrections that may be needed on a machined blank. I probably shouldn’t but, I do get a bit frustrated when I have to do fixes on machined blanks… Why should I have to fix something a robot did?

Surfboards don’t have to be perfect. You know that as soon as you ride a board a few times the decks may have dents in them and if one side is not exactly the same as the other it may not matter. After all, you only have one rail in the water, or one side of your board is engaged at a time for the most part. And, asymmetrical designs are valid. That said, a good craftsmen can tell when something is off, and we do our best to be accurate… at least I do and others I know.

Reality is with repetition, looking at things over and over and handling things over and over again, you get to the point that you can see and feel the most minute details… in my and Sammy’s case… it’s surfboards. And it really is amazing that we can take a planer and some sand paper, cut and carve a piece of foam, shaping a surfboard and then get another piece of foam and do the same thing and have both shaped blanks be so amazingly close in size, shape and detail that it’s next to impossible to tell if they even are different in some area, like one rail being thicker than the other of shaped ever so slightly different.

So if a machined blank is pretty darn good and the same size and shape board is hand shaped, like a certain model, one machine cut and one hand cut, what’s the difference? Only a human has emotion. Some how that gets transferred into what we make.

D.R.