Photo: T&C
Craig Sugihara always knew he wanted to work with his hands. He eventually would be famous for it, as a shaper and the founder of Oahu’s T&C Surf Designs. Before that, though, all he knew was that he wanted to make things. In high school, he had a shop teacher who told him to go to Church College (now BYU) for their industrial arts program, so that’s what he did. “The unfortunate thing was, for some reason, I didn’t do any woodwork,” he says. “We took apart engines and we did electrical things.”
He was only there for a year and a half, though. After that, he decided to transfer to the University of Hawaii. It was a decision he would later regret, as the classes were bigger and he felt like a number. However, that would soon be the least of his troubles.
“I broke my hand in that semester at UH,” he remembers. “The war was going on pretty heavy, and I couldn’t take notes because I broke my right hand, so I decided to just drop out a semester and I got drafted immediately. So that put a real damper in my college.”
“You better join the Guard,” his dad told him. “You’re going to go straight to Vietnam.”
So that’s what he did. He went to Lackland Air Force Base and scored well enough to get into cryptography. Craig spent nine months in the service, before returning to Hawai’i. “Then I came home and I wasn’t so eager to jump back into school,” he remembers. “Especially coming back from the service. You feel you need to kind of take a break. That’s when I surfed a lot.”
Craig Sugihara, still shredding. Photo: T&C
He had also been spending time at Inter-Island Surf Shop, the storied Oahu surfboard manufacturer that counted Sparky Scheufele and Ben Aipa among its shapers. When it had come time to move on from his first board (a 9’4” Hobie he’d once worked all summer to buy) he ordered one from Ben, who had just come back from California, under the tutelage of Donald Takayama. “From that time on, I was always hanging on,” says Sugihara. “They had a big glass window into the laminating bay. Anybody who came into the showroom could watch the laminator laminate boards. Watching Sparky Scheufele shape and later Ben, those two different people educated me, unbeknownst to them.”
Craig finally got to put that education to use when he came across an old surfboard at a neighbor’s house. “We kept running over this half-buried surfboard with a broken fin,” he continues. “I don’t know what they were going to use it for, but I asked for it and they gave it to me. So I stripped it and I had a planer that I borrowed from my uncle, who used to work on boats. Unbeknownst to me, under that sunburnt skin, it was all pure white foam.”
It was his first time taking a planer in his hands and working on a blank, but he took to it quickly. “I did the full copy of what I learned how to do,” he says. “I had watched them do every process of board building: laminating, hot coat, making fin panels, sanding, glossing. Not from a perspective of somebody teaching me, but I was just able to watch. With that knowledge, I just mimicked what they were doing.”
He shaped the board in his parents’ garage. Luckily, nobody complained about all the foam dust, which blew through the garage and went everywhere. “The board had a blue tint,” Craig describes “I don’t know why I did color work, I just did what they did. I should have done it clear, would have been easier.”
He doesn’t remember too much about riding it the first time, other than that it did not turn particularly easy and was difficult to paddle, on account of the amount of foam he took off the original board. That didn’t particularly matter, though. When asked about the performance of the board, Craig laughs. “I didn’t know what performance was when I was making it.”
He would only make one more homemade board before he got into the business proper. That second board was a pintail. “Chris Green was making these rounded pintails that looked really racy to me, so I copied the outline,” he says.
Photo: T&C
“For me, that surfboard and the second surfboard that I did with a real Clark Foam blank, I was really enjoying myself, you know. I really liked building things with my hands,” says Craig. “My friend from Church College, Peter Banks, was working at Greg Noll’s, and he told me that they had lost a laminator. He knew I was building my boards at home, so he said, ’Yeah, bring your board, check it out.’ I went up there, showed [Charlie Galanto] my board, and he said, ‘Come back.’ I went back the next day and he laid out two boards. We glassed the first one together, and he said, “Finish the second one.” Then at the end of the day, he looked at my work and he said, ‘Come back tomorrow. You got the job.’”
Craig became a laminator at Noll and began a journey that would eventually lead to founding T&C in a storefront that used to be a barbershop. “I had a real fast track to the industry,” he says. “I was in the right place at the right time.”
Editor’s Note: The Inertia’s Cooper Gegan works with well-known shapers to tell the stories of the first boards they created. Read about Stretch Riedel here , Darren Handley here, or Doc Lausch here.
