Go with the Grain

Ryan Johnson is our Accounting Assistant in the office. He's learned a lot of wood-working skills from his dad over the years and decided to build a wood surfboard provided by Grain. This is such a cool project: a handmade hollow wood surfboard. You basically eliminate all of the toxic materials associated with traditional surfboard manufacturing. Follow the progress of this board at his blog: Go With The Grain

Green Foam Shaped

Joey at Green Foam Blanks hooked us up with a blank to try out. We were lucky enough to have Brian Bencz from Laguna Republic put his planer to this recycled foam blank.


We wanted to make this board somewhat user-friendly for a lot of the folks in the office, to make sure it gets plenty of use. It's a 6'4" that's pretty thick through the middle. You can see from the last shot that we went with a 5-fin design, partially because a bunch of us are interested in riding one. See the Campbell Brothers for more info on the design and inspiration.

Green Foam Blanks

The guys at Green Foam Blanks have worked out a very innovative way to reduce some of the waste coming out of the surfboard industry. They collect foam shavings from shapers and re-introduce the shavings into the raw material mix to make new blanks, using a proprietary formula. These new "recycled" blanks come out essentially the same as traditional PU blanks but with some cool specks from the bits of stringer that are mixed in with the collected shavings. Matt Biolas with ...Lost is shaping with them and even getting his team riders on the boards. They hooked us up with a blank and I'll start into the building process for that board in the next post.

Joey and Steve, who run Green Foam, also formed Resurf which aims to keep old surfboards and the waste from the board building industry out of landfills. To do this they are working with local waste collection agencies and shaping factories to redirect the surfboard wastestream away from the landfill into a other uses. It turns out that the materials that surfboards are made out of can be very easily incorporated into asphalt for new roads.

There are already laws on the books that require the recycling of old asphalt and concrete from construction sites, and those materials are collected in a special area of the landfill. Old boards and shaping room foam can simply be added to those collections so they end up getting ground up and reused in the next road construction project. Joey and Steve are working with the local Waste Management agency to develop guidelines so that this process can be replicated throughout the country, and we fully support them in this effort!