History   |   Lumber   |   Milling   |   Glue Up   |   Shaping   | Making Fins History ` As a ten year old growing up in Orange County in the mid 50's I helped a neighbor unload a car full of lumber into his garage. It turned out to be a load of balsa wood and I got to help with building the first surfboard I had ever seen from start-to-finish. Sweeping up the mess and fetching tools was mostly my contribution. Upon smelling the freshly cut wood and polyester resin I was hooked. The leftover balsa wood scraps were mine to keep, making countless model surfboards. Although my friends and I were avid inflatable raft surfers who frequented the Newport beaches, we had never seen anyone with a surfboard or riding one. By the time I was in the eighth grade I was making my own skim boards, I had a steady girlfriend and a close-knit circle of friends. We spent warm summer days riding waves at 15th Street in Newport or the main beach at Corona del Mar. Then tragedy struck! My mom was re-marrying and she informed me we were moving to Las Vegas. Soon I discovered our new place of residence really sucked. I sank into the teenage rebellion mode. The first day at a new school was absolute culture shock. I was the only kid wearing worn out Levi's, a T-shirt and tennis shoes while all of the other guys wore pressed slacks, ironed sport shirts and real leather shoes. Nobody wanted to make friends with me. After a few weeks I became acquainted with a Santa Monica transplant named Roger. Although Roger was more or less accepting the Las Vegas desert lifestyle, he still talked about running away from home and going back to the beach. However, Roger just didn't have the means to follow through with his fantasy. By March of 1961 my stepfather had injured his knee playing golf and had to return to Orange County for surgery, leaving me and my mom behind. After a couple of weeks my mom informed me we also needed to go back for a week or two because she needed to look in on my stepfather who was now in the Long Beach Veterans Hospital and not doing well. This visit coincided with spring break and my old pals in Orange County were out of school for a whole week! Was I stoked to be going back or what. As soon as we arrived at our hotel in Orange County I began speed dialing everyone I knew. Those few short months in Las Vegas seemed like an eternity for me and I had a lot of catching up to do. When I called my friend Joe Potter he immediately invited me to go to the beach the next day with he and his brother Norman. My mom said it was OK and I set the alarm clock for 6 a.m. and packed a lunch. I woke up before the alarm went off and hurried out the door taking only the bare essentials for a day at the beach. The weather was perfect, as a Santa Ana wind condition was developing and there wasn't a hint of morning marine layer or overcast. Joe lived about a mile away and I ran all the way there without stopping. As I arrived at Joe's house early that morning I found him out in the front yard rubbing what turned out to be parafin wax onto the decks of two surfboards. "Are we going to the beach to ride these surfboards?" I asked with total surprise and breathless excitement. "Yeah, what did you think we were going to with them"? "Norm's driving us to River Jetty in my mom's car and we'll be there all day." Oh wow!  We were going surfing, for me, the very first time. I was so excited I couldn't see straight. I almost peed my pants as I danced around with excitement. (to be continued) .........a used castoff with numerous dings and a fin ready to fall off. As it turned out, I traded my Go Kart mini-bike to Joe for a 9'-6" balsa wood Hobie, serial #503. Through the years I've owned countless foam surfboards that rode well but never compared to the beauty of wood. I've always pursued woodworking as an avocation after taking wood shop in junior high and high school, later majoring in Wood Technology at Fullerton College and Industrial Arts at California State University Long Beach. After college I worked as a firefighter for 31 years before retiring. Along the way my 'day's-off' time was spent surfing San Onofre, Church's and Trestles, working with friends or family on various endeavors, building or fabricating whatever needed to be built or fabricated.   The fantasy of making and riding my own balsa wood surfboard would come and go and frequent visits to lumber yards never yielded a source for imported balsa wood.  I made this a reality after finally acquiring a source for wood and building my first wood surfboard in 1990. This work has become my passion!  I build one surfboard at a time for the surfboard collector wanting a pristine "wall hanger" and/or occasional sweet riding balsa wood classic for those few epic days at a local point break or secret spot. However, those who acquire a wood surfboard for a collection will no doubt never ride it, becoming a focal point proudly displayed on a living room wall. This is a small operation where only vintage planks and hot curls, 1960's classics, and contemporary big-wave gun wood surfboards are made by hand from imported balsa wood lumber. [ Back to the top ] Lumber It's always like your first time! Waiting and waiting, and finally taking delivery of several bundles of balsa wood. It's such a rush, but now the work begins. Not all lumber is the same. Color and weight varies from stick to stick, bundle to bundle. It seems that no matter how selective and fussy I am when choosing lumber, the task begins all over again when it comes to matching "sticks" for a particular surfboard. Weight is the enemy but color and grain configuration are a prerequisite for my needs. A 9-foot balsa wood surfboard with several stringers might weigh about 26 lbs. after glassing with a gloss and polish finish and a single glassed-on wood fin. [ Back to the top ] Milling Until balsa wood is surface planed and band milled, it's anyone's guess what each stick looks like. Surface planing is also the first step taken to ensure perfect glue joints between sticks and stringers. Rocker isn't an accident. To ensure a specific rocker, each segment is cut using a rocker template. This hasn't always been the case, however. Throughout the early 20th century wood surfboard rocker was limited to whatever a flat, glued up blank would yield. I have nothing but the utmost respect for those noble, skilled hand tool craftsmen who pioneered surfboard design and construction in the early years. They used a hand plane, drawknife and other hand tools to cut rocker into their surfboards, shaping such beautiful sought-after vintage and classic surfboards that now command a very respectable price. [ Back to the top ] Glue Up A 'glue up' isn't a quick and dirty, drippy process using glue and clamps to adhere several lengths of lumber and stringers together, side-by-side, all at one time, when building a blank. One segment at a time is glued to another; clamped and allowed to dry several hours. Then the clamps are released, glue is applied to another segment, and re-clamped for several hours. This process is repeated again and again until all of the components of a surfboard are glued together, completing the blank. This is very time-consuming and too impractical for most woodworking operations where profit margin is critical. I'm not into this just for the money, anyway. All of these tasks ensure good joinery and an accurate blank without the slightest hint of twist or wind that would otherwise need to be shaped out later. Of all my wood shop teachers, Ray Tolman is the one who taught me everything I needed to know to do woodworking without cutting corners or making "shit-shop" projects. Mr. Tolman, who taught at Fullerton College is held in high esteem by all those who studied under his direction. At one time in Ray's career he was a custom furniture maker in Santa Monica. He employed only the best journeyman woodworkers, building furnishings for the rich and famous, including Marilyn Monroe. Mr. Tolman always stressed the importance of good joinery, close attention to detail and tight glue ups, saying "You can never have too many bar clamps, even in the smallest of shops." [ Back to the top ] Shaping I won't apologize for not having shaped twenty thousand surfboards in my career before I began building balsa wood surfboards. It was just a matter of opportunity. For many years I watched a long-time surfing friend, and one of the leading surfboard shapers, do his magic. Every board he shaped was incredible. I've ridden many and each board I ordered from him I was allowed to watch being shaped while we talked at length. On one occasion I inquired if he would shape a balsa wood surfboard for me, or at least teach me to shape. That was a mistake! After a long silence and a critical stare in my direction he set his tools down and politely declined, pointing to the door for me to leave. I often wonder if he realized I was absorbing some of the basics of shaping 1A over the years while watching him work. I was shattered! The look on his face was as if I, his most trusted friend from our early years of surfing Doheny, had just snaked from him the wave of the day. Where could I run and hide? That was a turning point for me. Suddenly I was jealous that I didn't have that talent, and humiliated for crossing the line. As I strolled out of his shaping room for the last time I turned and said, "then I'll go somewhere else to learn to do my own magic!". We have remained friends, however, but we never discuss the subject of surfboard making. After beating my head against the wall, ruining numerous blanks over the years, bribing my so-called friends to just try out one of my crummy boards, asking dumb-ass questions of people who would rather not share their many years of shaping experience with the likes of me, I finally connected with a big-hearted master shaper! He too has been a friend for many years, and to me a spiritual giant. It never occurred to me he would be a willing teacher of his shaping expertise. We never traded waves due to our age difference, but he shares his methods of shaping, and I for the most part, will always be a student, and he my mentor, much like Ray Tolman when I studied woodworking in college. I now pride myself building beautiful balsa wood surfboards as if my long-time friends and teachers are looking over my shoulder, giving critical advice but not admitting they're stoked that I can apply what they have taught me.  By the time I have pulled lumber from storage, done the initial machine milling and bandsawing, carefully chosen each stick for a particular board, glued the blank and completed shaping, I've invested over forty-plus hours. Another 6 to 8 hours of hand sanding and the blank is ready for the glasser. Back to the top ] Making Fins I build my own fins from whatever hardwood that color matches the stringer and/or balsa wood combination I've chosen for a particular surfboard. Making surfboard fins is actually not difficult as long as you don't mind the mess, and the noise and dust from all of the sanding. This must be done outside unless you have a dust collection system. I've been making fins this way since Mr. Meyer's high school wood shop class at Orange High School in the mid-sixties. The wood shop teacher let us unruley 'surfer-types' make surfboard fins in class for extra credit. The scrap hardwood was put to good use that otherwise was thrown out. Most surfboard fins made in schools at that time were made up with at least five or six different hardwoods as we were all copying something we saw on a board at the beach or in the surf magazines. I tore the fin off of my first Hobie and replaced it right away. I did the same thing on my Wardy several times, just to glass on the latest fad-fin design. Soon I was doing the same for friends while still in high school, along with doing pigment jobs and ding repair. I even had an informal business partnership with a high school friend, Jon White. We pigmented friends' surfboards in his garage, making gas money for rides to the beach. His family must have been very tolerant as we managed to stink up the entire neighborhood with resin vapors. My friends and I thought making a surfboard heavier with a thick coat of pigment was a better nose rider. It definiely made running away from Camp Pendleton MPs at Trestles more difficult. So some of us resorted to storing our heavy, antiquated surfboards in a big tree on the beach between Lowers and Church. However, on one weekend we hitchhiked down to Trestles only to discover our boards had all been stolen! There are several hardwoods from which I try to make fins because they either match up with a board I'm working on, were generally preferred in the 1960's so I consider them "classic fin-making hardwoods", or a particular tropical exotic hardwood like spalted mango or curley koa. I also use walnut, mahogany, basswood, and ash. Once the fin is glued up, cut out and foiled, I do final sanding by hand. Then the entire wood surface area is "pasted" with a styrene-thinned hot batch of laminating resin and set aside to dry for a day or two in preparation for being laminated. The clear glass bead is laid up, and both sides of the fin are glassed with two layers of six ounce cloth, and later hot coated with sanding resin. More hand-sanding is done in preparation to be glassed onto the surfboard. Sounds easier than it really is, and a little messy too.   [ Back to the top ]

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