My shed shape. Photo courtesy of Maureen McNamara
I called them “Shed Shapes” because they were crafted in the true spirit of the backyard shaper and the longest run of my shaping and glassing days was all conducted in a 6×8 foot shed out in my back yard.
Because of the limitations of this small space, and for the better part of 20 years, I wasn’t able to make a board any longer than eight feet. It didn’t matter so much because at the time, I held nothing but disdain for longboards and longboard surfers. As my area was overrun with them in the ’90s, I considered them lame and only tools for kooks and old, out-of-shape has-beens. Of course, as I aged and devolved into a has-been myself, I did eventually give in and build an eight foot mini-mal.
To get the blank, and then the finished board, into and out of my “shop,” I had to lift the nose up into the elevated gambrel roof, and dip the tail down to the floor and pivot it through the door. The tip of the nose and tail actually fit in between two studs and kissed the wood of the exterior siding and it was a bit of a challenge to glass the finished shape. But like all the other boards I’d made over the years, I improvised, adapted and overcame my limitations.
I started surfing in 1974 and shaped my first board in 1975 in the detached garage of the summer cottage my family rented each July and August. There were no local shapers with whom to apprentice, nor was there any internet or Swaylocks or other mentors to show me the ropes back then. Not in Maine. I learned the process, start to finish, all from what I could glean from a blue paperback entitled: Surfboard Design And Construction, authored by James Kinstle and published by Natural High Express Publishing Company.
I’d found this early board building bible in an issue of Surfer Magazine and mail ordered my copy and waited with eager anticipation for the 6-8 weeks delivery. I still have it, complete with tattered pages and resin stains. It’s probably a collector’s item now. And though I made many mistakes on that first board – a blue, 7-foot pintail, orange-finned gun – including mistakenly laminating the board with gloss resin and glossing with laminating resin. I went through about a ream of sandpaper trying to sand that gummy resined board! I was pretty stoked with my first effort. Mom was less stoked with the mess I made, especially the resin splatters on the wood floor of that old garage that I’m sure remain there 39 years later.
Over the ensuing years, in other garages, basements, outdoors under the shade of trees, and of course in that little shed, I continued to develop my “craft.” For me, it was mostly a matter of economics. I found then, and still today, that I could roughly build two boards for the price of one off the racks in a surf shop. If I lived in an area where blanks were more readily accessible, I could have bettered that ratio but what always got me was the shipping of blanks from places like Florida, California and Washington state, to my little corner of the surfing globe in Maine.
I’m the first to admit I am no craftsperson. My “technique,” based mostly on a lot of trial and error, would make professional board builders cringe, I’m sure. It wasn’t until Swaylocks came along in recent times that I discovered how to perform most of the little tricks of the trade. But I’ve developed my own process and, while slow and crude, I’m able to produce boards that work. Shaping has always come a bit easier to me, not because I’m masterful with tools, which I am most certainly not, but because I have a pretty good eye and I’m not afraid of sweat and blood. And after 40 years of surfing almost every shape, I’d like to believe I know which designs are valid. Actually, I have an almost curmudgeonly, Parmenteresque (Dave Parmenter, my board design hero) type cynicism and am quite bored with most of modern equipment and contest-driven surfing for that matter. I find a lot of what is out there today is either gimmicky or, at the other end of the spectrum, refinement of the same old stale tri-fin design to the point of fetid stagnation.
I grew up on single fins and to me, that’s the foundation every surfer should build on, learning to surf the wave rather than the board, which single fins force you to do. That is not to say that other designs don’t, or can’t be valid, only that like most everything else these days, kids want to learn how to dunk before they can dribble, juggle before they can execute a basic inside-of-the-foot pass or boost air before they can put a board on rail off the bottom.
Glassing has always been my nemesis when it comes to board building. There are so many technical aspects to the process that only years and hundreds of boards glassed can master. And as I’m often strapped for finances, and only make a handful of boards each year, for either myself or a few friends, it’s taken me decades to reach even a base level of proficiency. But there’s something to be said for learning things the hard way. You haven’t lived until you’ve watched a batch go off in the bucket when you’ve still only saturated half the glass on the board with resin. Or tried to sand a board mistakenly hot coated with lam resin.
Many of my early boards were stripped down shapes. These are either old boards or boards that just didn’t work, that I stripped off the glass and re-shaped into something new, sometimes even using cheaper, boat yard resin, in all its brownish, root beer-tinted ugliness. I still do this today sometimes and call the reconstituted shapes my Frankenboards. I even have a logo of a Frankensteinian monster riding a taped and stitched board!
Sometimes I get ideas for prototypes and test them out this way. One of my current boards is an asymmetrical board that originally started as a high-performance longboard. It was then morphed to a “cut a foot off the nose” fun shape, only to strip the glass and reshape a 7’6” flat-rockered, bevel-railed mush buster. Then I cut six more inches off and reshaped to make a swallow tail. Then cut off one swallow and reshape more kick in the tail on the backside rail along with moving the sidebite (2+1 finset) on that side up for a more forward pivot point, flex finned, flat-rockered, flyer. This board looks weird and every bit as cobbled together parts-wise as did Frankenstein’s monster, but it goes really, really fast on the forehand, and is a bit looser on the backhand and works…for me! I call it the Platypus model cuz its flat, blunt nose looks like the bill of a platypus and platypus look like a collection of used animal parts as well.
After all these years, and meagerly improved technique, I’ve reached a point with my board building that I’m pretty confident in turning out good boards that work, though I’m still working on the cosmetic end of glassing. Trying my hand at tints and resin pinlines, like they used to do in the ’70s, makes me appreciate that much more the level of craftsmanship of the old masters.
I made two personal boards this boards this summer: an old school log, with a glassed-on fin and no leash plug because riding a longboard with a leash, to me, is like boosting an air at a long pointbreak and blowing the wave. Fugly! The second was a 7’6” hybrid shape that was designed to work in nearly all conditions. The log performed exactly as I designed it and I was able to ride it just how I wanted. On the very first wave, I pivoted off the bottom and cross-stepped right up to the nose, before backpedaling into a drop-knee cutback, some high line trim, and then finishing the wave with an actual kick-out. Remember when surfers ended their rides in this elegant fashion? The hybrid, on the other hand, is a “jury-still-out” affair. Not a fan of high-performance longboarding, (to me, shortboard maneuvers on longboards, with three feet of superfluous nose are not aesthetically pleasing) my intention was to make a wide, stable board that could still execute high-performance moves while more readily catching and trimming along the mushier breaks I often have to surf in my area. But like any compromise design, it doesn’t seem to work so well at either end of the spectrum and in the end is exactly that: a compromise. Of course, compromise is sometimes the best solution to certain situations so this board remains in my quiver for now.
I’ve not purchased a board off the racks nor ridden any other shape that I didn’t build myself since 1982. I’ve lost track of how many boards I’ve built, but every one of them was crafted with the stoke and anticipation of riding something that germinated inside my own head. I’ve made a fair number of boards for others in all that time as well, but I do it only on the side and more to fund my own projects rather than any kind of income-producing endeavor.
I am proud that most of the feedback I’ve received from customers is positive. I attribute this mostly to knowing what works in the conditions of my region and considering the skill level and experience of the people I’ve shaped for. I’ve certainly not made a name for myself in all these years, though this past summer I did get photographed and interviewed for Eastern Surf Magazine. Sadly, I didn’t make the cut for the feature on east coast shapers, pros and backyarders like myself, but then, that was never my motivation for building my own equipment anyway.
These days I’ve changed my label to Mo-FLOW Surfboards in order to reflect my philosophy on a more flowing approach of surfing with the wave rather than merely using it as a launch ramp. I know, kinda old school, hippy drippy, but those are my roots. I also no longer build out of a shed but have a detached workshop on my property where there is plenty of space to shape and glass and conduct my mad experiments. It’s been a humbling, yet often exhilarating experience crafting my own designs. They say that every surfer should try their hand at building their own board and I fully concur. If nothing else, you gain an appreciation of the true craftsmanship and toil that the professional board builders put into that slab of foam and glass under your feet. And when you take off on, and connect with, a wave on a board you built with your own hands, you experience that magic that only a very small percentage of boards can achieve. There’s no better feeling in surfing I think.
