China boards
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It's worth noting that it's the surfboard manufacturers themselves who are moving production to China. As the technology evolves (surflite, for instance) it gets easier to mass produce a decent product. I don't think the idea that these boards are poor replicas is the right one to hold onto (I seem to remember something about Japanese televisions, appliances and cars....now where was that?).
At the moment the shapers are howling because they're being squeezed out - there's a limited market for custom boards. Most surfers don't need the finely tuned board of a pro - just something that goes well in most conditions. It's an unfortunate reality of economics that mass production leads to market domination by a few big players. Smaller players become boutique manufacturers, often specialising in a niche and usually a lot more expensive (look at furniture, for instance). The mass marketing of surfing by the clothing companies comes home to roost - but it's not the big clothing execs that are going to feel the pain - it's the guy with foam dust in his hair and a Skil in his hand.
Kneeboarding is somewhat cushioned because it's such an insignificant market. Most kneeboarders prefer custom boards, yet there still is not enough demand for any kneeboard shaper to be relying 100% on shaping kneeboards for income. The economic imperative does not exist for kneeboard manufacture to change as much as surfboard manufacture has to.
The wise shapers are migrating to computer designed, machine shaped boards. The realise that their service is their knowledge, not their technical ability with a Skil. They'll still build custom boards, but they'll do the design in minutes on a computer with the customer right there, giving input. The customer will actually see what they are getting before it's shaped. This latter point is going to revolutionise the custom board industry.
In a situation where the customer is given a picture of the completed design we're likely to see formal contracts that entrench the designers copyright (in the same way that architectural plans are protected). The contracts will specify the tolerances in manufacture (money back guarantees), but probably not in usage. Production will be scheduled, so the delivery date is likely to become contractual. There is no guarantee that boards will come out faster bcause there may be a queue for the shaping machines (with all kinds of surf craft coming off the same machine).
The glassing and finishing process has to change. There are new materials that are easier to work with, lighter and stronger, but the industry has been plain slack (Al Merrick has been using different technologies for 20 years). The consumers will get used to boards that feel different (think about fin systems - a manufacturer-driven change that we've come to accept). The next logical step will be mechanised glassing and finishing. I reckon this is close - the economics dictate that this must happen if Western manufacturers are to remain competitive with the cheap labour component of foreign boards.
Personally I'm not really concerned about imported boards. What really worries me is the idea that the Chinese may take up surfing. That's a lot of extra bodies in the lineup!!!
At the moment the shapers are howling because they're being squeezed out - there's a limited market for custom boards. Most surfers don't need the finely tuned board of a pro - just something that goes well in most conditions. It's an unfortunate reality of economics that mass production leads to market domination by a few big players. Smaller players become boutique manufacturers, often specialising in a niche and usually a lot more expensive (look at furniture, for instance). The mass marketing of surfing by the clothing companies comes home to roost - but it's not the big clothing execs that are going to feel the pain - it's the guy with foam dust in his hair and a Skil in his hand.
Kneeboarding is somewhat cushioned because it's such an insignificant market. Most kneeboarders prefer custom boards, yet there still is not enough demand for any kneeboard shaper to be relying 100% on shaping kneeboards for income. The economic imperative does not exist for kneeboard manufacture to change as much as surfboard manufacture has to.
The wise shapers are migrating to computer designed, machine shaped boards. The realise that their service is their knowledge, not their technical ability with a Skil. They'll still build custom boards, but they'll do the design in minutes on a computer with the customer right there, giving input. The customer will actually see what they are getting before it's shaped. This latter point is going to revolutionise the custom board industry.
In a situation where the customer is given a picture of the completed design we're likely to see formal contracts that entrench the designers copyright (in the same way that architectural plans are protected). The contracts will specify the tolerances in manufacture (money back guarantees), but probably not in usage. Production will be scheduled, so the delivery date is likely to become contractual. There is no guarantee that boards will come out faster bcause there may be a queue for the shaping machines (with all kinds of surf craft coming off the same machine).
The glassing and finishing process has to change. There are new materials that are easier to work with, lighter and stronger, but the industry has been plain slack (Al Merrick has been using different technologies for 20 years). The consumers will get used to boards that feel different (think about fin systems - a manufacturer-driven change that we've come to accept). The next logical step will be mechanised glassing and finishing. I reckon this is close - the economics dictate that this must happen if Western manufacturers are to remain competitive with the cheap labour component of foreign boards.
Personally I'm not really concerned about imported boards. What really worries me is the idea that the Chinese may take up surfing. That's a lot of extra bodies in the lineup!!!
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Beeline2.0
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doc
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Wow, Red has put it all very, very well....
A couple of things I noticed in that magazine/newspaper article -
Also - this irked me;
Biolos is, basicly, a t-shirt maker that branched out into surfboard making. Maybe to give himself a little 'legitimacy', so that all the Midwestern dweebs wandering around with surf t-shirts 2000 km from the ocean could get surfboards to bolt onto their cars with the same logo. He did some market research to find out where the money was going to be.
Good for him. Bet there will be lots and lots of machine shaped Lost brand boards in the containers coming from Vietnam, along with Placebo brand. He may not be selling 'em in Orange County, but I'm sure they will turn up elsewhere. Without any 'country of origin' stickers......
What, me, cynical? naaah - after nearly forty years in the surf biz, I couldn't be cynical, right???
doc.....
A couple of things I noticed in that magazine/newspaper article -
followed by“All the larger name-brand boards are being made overseas and imported, and it’s forcing more and more manufacturers to go overseas,” Biolos says during an interview in his office, an unfinished, narrow affair with a desktop computer. Loaded with Biolos’ designs, the computer runs a saw in the workshop next door
Anybody else see a leetle inconsistency there?To preserve his hand-shaped surfboard business,
Also - this irked me;
Lets see, polyurethane foam and polyester resin ain't plastics, eh? Ok, let me go out back and see if my polyurethane tree is in bloom, and maybe tap some resin from the polyester Maple tree too while I'm there. Shame they don't make journalism majors take a few science courses.....Instead of being shaped by hand from foam blanks made by Laguna Niguel-based Clark Foam, which owns the patent for the foam blank and holds a virtual monopoly on the market, Placebo boards are made of molded epoxy resin, PVC foam and extruded polystyrene—what you and I call plastic.
Biolos is, basicly, a t-shirt maker that branched out into surfboard making. Maybe to give himself a little 'legitimacy', so that all the Midwestern dweebs wandering around with surf t-shirts 2000 km from the ocean could get surfboards to bolt onto their cars with the same logo. He did some market research to find out where the money was going to be.
Good for him. Bet there will be lots and lots of machine shaped Lost brand boards in the containers coming from Vietnam, along with Placebo brand. He may not be selling 'em in Orange County, but I'm sure they will turn up elsewhere. Without any 'country of origin' stickers......
What, me, cynical? naaah - after nearly forty years in the surf biz, I couldn't be cynical, right???
doc.....
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Eric Carson
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Shelfbreak
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Hopefully Red's right about the computer shaping bit. Because unless our shapers (who I understand are in a similiar cohort to me - 40 to 50 yrs) have apprentices interested in shaping kneeboards the younger kneelos amongst us might have fewer custom options in the future.
I'm a bit worried about the day they decide to hang up their planers and take up lawn bowls.
I'm a bit worried about the day they decide to hang up their planers and take up lawn bowls.
Shelfbreak
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DrStrange
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Manny (Mandala custom fish etc) Caro told me awhile ago that he had been trying to find shop-rat apprentice in Santa Cruz and had several times lined up some young 'un and when they were suppsed to meet him at the shop to start learning the ropes...no show. Later, he'd see them at the beach and they'd say, "Ohhhh, sorry Dude. Went surfin' in Mexico. It was the s*&^, Dude." No interest. Pretty sad. Said he personally didn't feel competent to teach shaping yet but I bet once in there, an interested kid could pick up a lot. Oh, well.
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W.G. Facenda
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i think they now have a surf industry degree course in Australia eminating from rip curl in Torquay or Torquay in general
perhaps shaping could somehow be attached to it
many shapers do go on to open fully fledged surf shops - Parkes and Mick D from strapper in aust are easy examples
i dont know if such course are run elsewhere
perhaps shaping could somehow be attached to it
many shapers do go on to open fully fledged surf shops - Parkes and Mick D from strapper in aust are easy examples
i dont know if such course are run elsewhere
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doc
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machine shaped kneeboards
The thing sabout machine shaping, or perhaps machine pre-shaping would be closer to the truth, are these ( and forgive me if ya know this already ) ;
A CAD/CAM driven machine can pre-shape a kneeboard, a paipo or a picture of my dog about as easily as a surfboard. Getting it to the rough shape isn't a function of what type of board it is. Getting it to as arbitrarily close to the design as you want it to be is a matter of how many passes the machine makes for most machines, which in turn involves machine time, factory time, etc.
But there is that last little bit with sandpaper that has to be done, getting those last few touches just right. That's what separates the masters from the knuckleheads. The latter category includes me.
Good things: within the tolerance of the tools, a machine preshaped board is likely to be more symmetrical, more 'on' than a planer-shaped board. And for a dedicated experimenter who wants to futz with a design ever so slightly, to fine tune or just find out what happens, really get it down. Or make a board just like a 'magic board' - whip out the appropriiate CD-R and sonofagun, there it is.
Or you want to change something a little? Yep, might do the router bit no favors, but set it on the table and have at it, then reglass.
And, of course, the really skilled shaper isn't wasting their time skinning blanks, or maybe trying to salvage a blank where his apprentice shaper attempted to skin it and kinda had a bad moment.
Oh, and - for those who might like to make a flex spoon from a full blank rather than a male mold but could really give sanding away all the foam in the center a miss and have the machine do it? Yep, quite possible.
Hell, if the machines didn't cost five grand US and up, I'd give it some thought myself..... lots of goodies I could make with a 3D capable CAD/CAM router......
oh well - back to the drawing board and the sur-form
doc...
A CAD/CAM driven machine can pre-shape a kneeboard, a paipo or a picture of my dog about as easily as a surfboard. Getting it to the rough shape isn't a function of what type of board it is. Getting it to as arbitrarily close to the design as you want it to be is a matter of how many passes the machine makes for most machines, which in turn involves machine time, factory time, etc.
But there is that last little bit with sandpaper that has to be done, getting those last few touches just right. That's what separates the masters from the knuckleheads. The latter category includes me.
Good things: within the tolerance of the tools, a machine preshaped board is likely to be more symmetrical, more 'on' than a planer-shaped board. And for a dedicated experimenter who wants to futz with a design ever so slightly, to fine tune or just find out what happens, really get it down. Or make a board just like a 'magic board' - whip out the appropriiate CD-R and sonofagun, there it is.
Or you want to change something a little? Yep, might do the router bit no favors, but set it on the table and have at it, then reglass.
And, of course, the really skilled shaper isn't wasting their time skinning blanks, or maybe trying to salvage a blank where his apprentice shaper attempted to skin it and kinda had a bad moment.
Oh, and - for those who might like to make a flex spoon from a full blank rather than a male mold but could really give sanding away all the foam in the center a miss and have the machine do it? Yep, quite possible.
Hell, if the machines didn't cost five grand US and up, I'd give it some thought myself..... lots of goodies I could make with a 3D capable CAD/CAM router......
oh well - back to the drawing board and the sur-form
doc...
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JackG
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How long before I can run the CAD software on my machine at home, and have a fully glassed board delivered? My understanding is that today the technology requires hand finishing that demands a master's touch, and in fact the same master driving the CAD software. But isn't that just an artifact of the cost of a machine tool that would do the final sanding?
In this world of CAD to glassed board direct, what would the role of the shaper be? It would be creating the template designs and or writing the CAD software that people could tweak. Software doesn't make people experts, and certainly what you get when you get a custom surfboard isn't just the craft skill of the shaper, it is also the knowledge of the shaper in regard to what shape to make. And that will never change -- the study of surfboard shapes and how they react to different conditions and surfers is a very human of study.
I work in the world of software and electronic design software. In the old world computer software was written in machine instruction primitives, "assembly language", that was custom to each brand of computer, and it was a very tedious and error prone process. Today almost all software is written in a higher level language that is translated to assembly using a tool called a compiler (OK, still error prone and tedious, but we get much more done). Compiler writters are the assembly code masters of yesteryear. Computer chips are done much in the same way -- almost no one designs at the level of individual transistors (or even polygons if you are a real hardware geek) when a single chip has millions of them. "Hardware compilers" are used to do the low level dirty work.
I use the software analogy because it is a craft industry much like surf board manufacturing is. For example every company needs software packages tweaked to their particular business, but these are tweaks not complete rewrites. There are numerous "ERP" packages, but each one get's customers. Could we ever get there with boards? Many base designs from the master board shapers, but I could tweak it myself within parameters set by the master who may live down the street (there is a shaper in my neighborhood), and it shows up via FedEx? And would that be such a bad thing?
In this world of CAD to glassed board direct, what would the role of the shaper be? It would be creating the template designs and or writing the CAD software that people could tweak. Software doesn't make people experts, and certainly what you get when you get a custom surfboard isn't just the craft skill of the shaper, it is also the knowledge of the shaper in regard to what shape to make. And that will never change -- the study of surfboard shapes and how they react to different conditions and surfers is a very human of study.
I work in the world of software and electronic design software. In the old world computer software was written in machine instruction primitives, "assembly language", that was custom to each brand of computer, and it was a very tedious and error prone process. Today almost all software is written in a higher level language that is translated to assembly using a tool called a compiler (OK, still error prone and tedious, but we get much more done). Compiler writters are the assembly code masters of yesteryear. Computer chips are done much in the same way -- almost no one designs at the level of individual transistors (or even polygons if you are a real hardware geek) when a single chip has millions of them. "Hardware compilers" are used to do the low level dirty work.
I use the software analogy because it is a craft industry much like surf board manufacturing is. For example every company needs software packages tweaked to their particular business, but these are tweaks not complete rewrites. There are numerous "ERP" packages, but each one get's customers. Could we ever get there with boards? Many base designs from the master board shapers, but I could tweak it myself within parameters set by the master who may live down the street (there is a shaper in my neighborhood), and it shows up via FedEx? And would that be such a bad thing?