I’ve seen another conversation going on one of the forums about the dying art of hand shaping.

The craft of shaping a surfboard with power tools and hand tools has faded from the production of surfboards for sure but crafting a shape “by hand” will always be done most likely.  And really, the guys that have any complaint about “The Machine” should be guys that were once production shapers and have been replaced by “The Machine”. Of which I am one.

Now days a production shaper is a person that finishes a cut blank.. hardly much skill involved for that.  Evidenced by a help wanted ad for a shaper at CI a half dozen years ago, they wanted someone with one year experience.

But here is the question.  Is hand shaping 10 surfboards a day five days a week art any more than a CNC machine milling a blank in 15 minutes?  What’s more graceful, a guy running around a blank with a planer or the magical moves of the cutting head on a CNC machine? 

Duplicating the same shape over and over again, all be it in different sizes, never seemed very artful to me. It seemed like work… and hard work at that.  Making all the same cuts… sort of like a machine… was the strategy for consistency, as well a necessity for being consistent.  Believe me, when you walk into a surf shop and see a model in sizes ranging for 10’2 to 8’0 or a couple dozen 6’0 to 6’6 boards they are all supposed to look and feel the same and just vary in size. Same rocker, same nose and tail details, same rail shape and bottom contours… just as if a machine had done the work. Doing that never felt like art to me.

Now taking your time and scribing an outline on a blank, making cuts to clean up inconsistencies in a blank, carefully making passes with your planer and hand tools to dial in a shape, and screening it down to a nice clean detail is artful.  The end result being an eye pleasing foil… yeah, that could be called art.

D.R.