Our neighbor Steve has been mining our waste resin for the past couple of years and making some cool stuff to hang on the wall. Otherwise we just throw it away. Its nice to recycle trash into art.

5 fin bonzer with hand foiled fins by Daniel.

Long Division

I've posted this board before here, but I finally wrestled it out of Leslie's grimy mitts and into the bedroom where it belongs, awaiting pickup, wax, and shreditation.
The cream-tinted deck color is carried over to the bottom, where Fatty unleashed some serious resin kung-fu in what could be interpreted as a fertility symbol, a crop circle, or a libidinous stage of cell division.
Speaking of cell division, my wife was the recipient of a chain Amish Friendship Bread outbreak two weeks ago, and we couldn't be more pleased. Unlike its pesky cousin, the chain email, which promises only an illusory sexual nirvana, Amish Friendship Bread offers wonderful smells from your kitchen and the everlasting friendship that only the combined power of the Amish and baked goods can deliver.
It works like this: someone gives you Amish Friendship Bread yeast. This is the 'starter.' It looks like hot mayo in a plastic bag, but smells better. The starter is incubated for ten days in its plastic universe, then hatched into the world in the form of a lot more starter. You use some of this to make delicious bread for your husband and baby girl, and give the rest of the starter, which you have now divided into plastic bags, to a bunch more people.
They make more bread and starter, and the chain remains unbroken. We realize our human connectedness through hollow calories and sugary crusts.
The recipe for starter is protected by an ancient Pennsylvania Dutch curse, but can also be found on Wikipedia.
Speaking of babies on surfboards, here's mine. When a surfboard becomes available, she climbs on, waddles straight to the nose and poses, awaiting a photograph. Although this behavior seems to be growing in popularity in some longboard circles, it's much cuter if the perpetrator is fourteen months old.
You might be thinking 'regular-foot,' but she's actually switch-stancing here.
Hope you're getting some surf.

Dennis and I have been making these custom wood fins together. Custom shaped and colored to match the boards.

Skip gave us a couple more fish to do for Waves Forever.

Dennis spends time with every board to make sure they come out just right.

Laminations of the day.

I got the first side on the loaner board today. So far it's coming along nicely.

I just shaped this board as a loaner board for the shop. It's 8'3 x 22 1/2. 

Hull.icio.us

Living and surfing the Northcoast requires low expectations and a sense of humor. And a dependable car. And a hood. And a good Thermos. And some healthy rationalization skills.
Popular rationalizations include (but are not limited to):
Your many hours of driving the coastline are a form of reconnaissance , not a desperate mania that could be tempered with medication.
Your wetsuit is going to be totally dry in the morning.
Whitey chomping your ass is statistically less probable than _______ hitting your ______(feel free to fill in the blanks in the 'comments' section).
My favorites are board rationalizations: you need the exact same board in a pintail for when it has a bit more push. You need the exact same board with a double-to-single concave instead of a single-to-double concave because your buddy has one and it rips. You need the exact same board except in a quad setup just to see what it's like.
For some reason, our power of rationalization is sparked by our curiosity. I blame biology.
A stellar design with a trim-forward ideology, Displacement Hulls love clean conditions and peeling waves. Unfortunately, Sonoma County offers neither on most days. Enter the rationalization.
Hulls have enjoyed some press and popularity lately, even up here. Media images abound featuring perfect San Juanico peelers, endless swooping and gliding, and feet-almost-touching buried rail turns that could turn even Karl Rove into a believer.
And why not? We've all seen pictures or heard stories of when our local spot, scoring somewhere between passable and unspeakable on most days, totally lights up. We ourselves might even be guilty of passing on such mythologies to others in parking lots, text messages, or, um, online resources.
And we order boards for these days. And we look at them. And we imagine. We're that guy from work who has a postcard of St. Croix tacked to his bulletin board, or that lady who buys the supermarket glossy telling her what really drives men crazy. We rationalize and say, "we might be held hostage, and the terrorists will demand to know what really drives men crazy, and I'll be the only one who can save us," but that's not what we mean. What we mean is: I want to be there right now. I want to be in the Bahamas, or driving men crazy, or trimming with unbelievable speed, free from the confines of neoprene on a waist high wave that's so glassy that I'm not sure where it begins and where it ends.
Hulls do that for me.
This particular hull is a 6'7"x21.5 shaped from EPS foam and glassed with epoxy resin by Fatty. If you're thinking that a resin tint over EPS/epoxy is a difficult thing to do, you're right on the money.
These boards are more or less combinations of convexes, meant to drive off the rails and fin. The third picture illustrates the rolled bottom, which continues until it hits the fin and transitions to a long, wide flat spot for extra zing.
It might take a moment to rationalize owning a board this specialized, but think of the payoff that one day a year when your break is doing its best impression of Lower's, and you've got the perfect tool for the job.

We got some nice fins from Daniel Partch. He is a really good fin maker from right here in San Diego. Check his blog out  http://danielsfins.blogspot.com/

This is the laminating floor up close. Many layers of boards here.  A lot of labor too.

I had to change the laminating room floor today. It was getting thick down there. Berfore and after.

This is what are waste acetone looks like after we recycle it.

This is one of the custom wood nose rider fins we have been making for Christenson surfboards.

new site coming soon

Tiger striped bottom with a red tint inlay deck and black resin pin line. Custom for Derrik.

Speaking of Roundtails...

This eight-oh's for local she-shredder K. Pic taken at the Fattyshack.
Not that many glass shops out there have organic gardens, a trampoline, hottub, and homemade greenhouse...
Eight feet long, cream deck with a green bottom and red pinline. Classy.

It's been said that the bottom resin design, done by Fatty herself, resembles an ancient fertility symbol, so be gentle if you knock the owner off of to give it a whirl yourself. And go easy on the Tecates after riding--you could be drinking for two!

Leftovers of the day.

The first picture  is a picture of Dennis when he was a kid in Coronado (left side) that was published in the book below. The last is a fairly recent picture of Dennis ripping.