Josh Martin has surfboards in his blood. The California-based shaper was recently the focus of Makita’s “I Build Because” series, and he explained how all that foam made its way into his life. Makita, as you likely know, is a tool brand, but a good shaper needs good tools and Martin is a Makita guy.
I’m more of a Ryobi guy myself — interchangeable batteries and a low price point will sell me any day — but Makita is certainly held in higher esteem by professionals. Back to Josh Martin, though.
You’ve likely heard of his father, Terry Martin. “My dad started shaping in 1952,” Josh said. “He shaped until 2012. He would shape 10 surfboards a day — stock surfboards — for Hobie for decades. He shaped probably well over 100,000 surfboards by hand. That’s prolific.”
Not only is Josh the son of Terry, but he’s also the nephew of big-wave pioneer, surfer, and shaper Mickey Muñoz. Growing up under the tutelage of a shaper like Terry had a great impact on Josh’s life, but he was always certain that he’d follow in his dad’s footsteps.
“What do you do when you’re the son of the best there is?” Josh asked rhetorically. I found myself living in the shadow of my dad. My dad certainly was the last one who wanted to cast a shadow on me; he was my biggest fan. But it was a self-imposed raincloud. There was a good part of my life where I walked around lacking confidence that I could be doing the same thing that he did, and one way to get out from that was to just say, ‘I’ll do something else for a career.'”
Before Josh took up his father’s tools, he walked a winding road full of different jobs. A meat cutter. He worked on a commercial fishing boat. He was a bailiff for the Orange County Marshal’s Department before moving to the HVAC industry for about two decades and eventually starting his own business. When the economy changed, though, his business faltered.
“All my work dried up,” he said. “That’s not an easy place to be when you’ve got a family and a house and a mortgage… I was a slave to all this nonsense around me and I thought, ‘Gosh, this is the worst. Why am I here?'”
That’s when his father approached him with an offer to help shape a whole lot of surfboards. It would give him a little bit of security for a few months and keep him busy, so he agreed. And it changed his life.
“That time spent shaping the same board over and over again, that turned into muscle memory,” he remembered. “I would find myself day dreaming for a while as I was working… Getting to that point where using a tool becomes natural, you’re so confident you can really enjoy what you’re doing.”
So he stuck with it, all the while still working to boost his HVAC business. But after his father passed away from skin cancer, Hobie came to Josh with a question. They wanted to know if he’d be interested in filling the void his dad left. He shut down his HVAC business, built a shaping garage in his house, and dove headfirst into the path his father had walked him down. He was much farther along it now, and he would be walking it alone, but he had the confidence that he would succeed.
And Josh has finally grasped what his father told him many years ago. “‘Just remember,'” Josh said his dad told him, “‘our job as surfboard shapers is that we aim to make people happy in the water.'”
Terry taught Josh how to shape boards in the mid 1980’s. Today you’ll find Josh in his Capistrano Beach workspace, building anything from a traditionally handcrafted wood surfboard to an EPS foam and epoxy longboard for world champion Rachael Tilly.
