WHY SLACKBOARDS?

by Ben Slack

If you didn't already know, the feeling of surfing a board you have made yourself is amazing.

However, you don't have to have made it yourself to have agency on what you ride.

Making boards for myself is still very rewarding and it's true, there isn't one perfect board for every occasion, so I am still innovating new shapes and discovering.

I really enjoy listening to what people want and then translating that into a shape that the surfer is excited to go and use. It's not easy, but interpreting someone's wishes, making a board and watching someone enjoy their surfing is a great feeling!

It takes a lot of thought to combine the elements to make a board perform well. Simply put, there's the size and shape of rails, bottom contours, rocker and foil and how they all interplay, and you can't change one element without adjusting the others, or the board could lose some of its capabilities. Here lies the challenge of making a board for someone or customising an existing board in the range.

I revel going surfing with customers or if someone has video footage of how they surf, then listening to how they feel and what they want to do and where they want to get. Only after this research and discussion can the calculations of customising a board begin.

A major part of this decision making process is people have ideas of what kind of board they want, understandably. Maybe these ideas are suitable and manageable, in which case all is well and good and we can proceed to the shaping. However, there may be misconceptions and/or misunderstandings as to what somebody wants and what shape they think will achieve that. This is all valuable communication and all part of the conversation to make sure the most important aim is achieved; the end product is exactly what the surfer wants and they are excited to take it into waves, have fun and progress their surfing.

As far as repairing goes, I've always been pretty good at ruining boards and Guto at Y Cwt Trwsio has laughed at my clumsiness over the years when I often took my boards to him for repairs. It's okay to ding boards, it's so easy to do, its going to happen.

The work to repair is as challenging as it is as different to shaping a new board:

There is the reshaping to match an existing curve, and depending on how long the repair area is that curve needs blending to an ever changing curve.

The placement of a fin-box to have the right cant, toe-in and angle and then be the correct depth to cover with the right amount of fibreglass.

There is the colour matching process which is never simple and always complicated... how do you colour match a new repair to 10 years of UV damage? HA! - people who can do this are true masters who have taken the time to learn how to do something well.

Repairing is a refreshing type of work that gives me a different type of job satisfaction to making boards. And quite importantly, repairing other peoples' boards give me the opportunity to see lots of different boards shaped for local waves all over the world. This all feeds back into the ongoing lifelong learning of what it is to be a local surfboard shaper.