One wouldn’t normally look at their wool sweater and think, “hey, I could glass a surfboard with that.” One would be mistaken, though, because Firewire is doing just that. The surfboard giant created the new method of glassing, which uses half the amount of fiberglass. It substitutes two sheets of glass—one on the bottom and one on the top—with two sheets of wool.
The process was invented a New Zealand shaper named Paul Barron. “I was laminating a board at my factory in Tauranga, New Zealand one day,” Barron said. “I spilled some resin on a wool jersey I was wearing, and that’s when it hit me: I could make a surfboard using natural fibers sourced in New Zealand. And not only is the wool a New Zealand made product, it works just as good, if not better than fiberglass.”
The wool used comes from sustainably sheared wool from sheep that live on Pamu Certified farms in New Zealand. According to Firewire’s release, wool has a few properties that make it fantastic for glassing. “We were quickly educated on “strong wool,” Firewire wrote, “a method of milling and applying wool’s naturally occurring tensile strength towards solid goods like furniture or boats, for example.”
When they had the R and D dialed in, they handed out a few boards to some of their team riders, like Rob Machado. Firewire glassed one of Machado’s newest shapes, the Seaside, with Woolite, and the results were good, to say the least.
