The Making of a Shaper : Earning a Place

People often ask how someone becomes a surfboard shaper.

For me, it didn't begin in a shaping room.

It started in a backyard in Key West.

After graduating from high school, I had already built a few boards on my own. I knew the crew at Spectrum Surfboards in Indialantic, Florida, but I'd never actually been inside the factory. I stopped by the shop one day and asked if they could glass one of my boards. They directed me to the factory. That was the first time I stepped inside a real surfboard factory.

Back then, every serious surfboard label had multiple shapers working under one roof. Four shaping rooms, racks of freshly shaped blanks waiting to be glassed, and the sound of several Skil 100 planers running at the same time.

It's a sound you hardly hear anymore.

I asked if I could glass on my own fins, and Craig Bobbitt, the owner of Spectrum, simply said,

"Why don't you come in on a Saturday?"
So I did.

This was before removable fin systems—everything was glass-on. I wasn't very good at it, and I spent that Saturday making mistakes and learning from them.

Later that day, Craig walked by, watched me for a moment, and asked,

"Do you need a job?"
I said yes.

He needed someone to do ding repair, and just like that, I had my foot in the door.

Around the same time, one of Spectrum's shapers, John Lucas, had seen one of my early boards and was impressed enough to take me under his wing. He let me stand quietly in the corner of his shaping room, watch him work, and every now and then he'd show me something new.

Every shaper there taught me something, but John probably taught me the most.

I wasn't just repairing dings. I was cutting fin panels, foiling fins, installing fin boxes, and doing whatever needed to be done around the factory. Every job taught me something about how a surfboard should be built.

Then, when I was about twenty years old, John and Craig had a disagreement, and John left Spectrum.

That left an empty shaping room.

Craig handed me a stack of stock order forms and said,
"Here. You're a shaper now."

I was only twenty. But honestly, I didn't believe him.

Even after moving to Hawaii, through my twenties and well into my thirties, I still had a very different idea of what a real shaper was. In my mind, a real shaper was always someone over forty who had been through a few crises, survived them, and kept building boards anyway. I still felt like I had a long way to go.

Whenever someone told me,

"You're a great shaper,"
my answer was almost always,
"Not yet."

With good fortune, good timing, and incredible mentors, it still took me decades to feel like a shaper. I always believed becoming a shaper couldn't be rushed.

A thousand boards earns you the right to call yourself a shaper.
Ten thousand boards is where you might start becoming a good one.
The numbers don't really matter.

The mindset does.

You start at the bottom.
You learn every step of the process.
You earn the respect of the people around you.

Only then does someone hand you a planer and trust you to shape under their label.

And looking back now, I realize that process shaped me just as much as the surfboards I was building.



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