Recycled rubbish= Cool Surfboards

Welcome to Winter...November was so epic...and December is throwing it in the face of November with every day blowing off shoree on the West coast here in sunny southern Portugal... Its pretty freaky how good the conditions have been the last few weeks. Surf's up, crowds are gone...good times. Its time to pump up the Holy Surf Boards with some pranayama so I am trying to get my shit together and work on a website and official facebook page.  I am feeling good in my little shaper's studio, and am ready to pump out some more boards.  So recently... here is the Craik:
I am stoked on recycling.  We live in a fuct up world where everything is mass produced to hell..There is so much garbage floating in the oceans that microns of plastic are being detected in sea salt.  Plastic is a cancer!  Anyway, I am stoked on recycling...There is an art to it.  Recently I have made a couple of boards that are made with Recycled Foam!  To be a great recycler you just have to be inventive and creative.  However, the very best recyclers are the people who have the least amount of money.  They can come up with ingenious creations out of other people's trash...So here's the craik...(I like saying that today) I have been collecting a load of broken boards from surf schools, stripping them down to their eps foam core, and reshaping them...Holy recycled surfboard batman....
Not like I think recycling foam is going to save the ocean or make the world a better safer place, but its cool, its free foam, and its fun.  Its also a great creative process.  With recycled foam you have to cut out shapes within the confines of very flat and broken pieces of old foamie top boards.  Here is a photo of the first board I made. Its much more time consuming than shaping a pressed blank, but its somehow more rewarding knowing that you are working something that would otherwise go straight into the land fill.  The other really cool thing is that these pieces of foam are allowing me to experiment with some pretty cool and weird ideas.  This is Holy Surfboard 0013...

The Finless Wanderer...I got super stoked on Derek Hynd and Tom Wegener's finless revolution that I had try to one myself...And this thing is pretty wild.  I am no master of the finless surf yet, but I have pulled a few pretty wicked 360's on this nugget...And that is a really cool feeling. This board is flat, flat, flat...As I was working with a recycled blank, I used epoxy resin and a light glass schedule.  Originally I glassed on some very small side fins, however I found they limited the slide of the board so I sliced them off sacrificing bottom turn for bottom slide...This board has very hard rails on the laset 2/3 s of the board, and a very weird kind of single concave channel on the tail.  Still, I have only surfed here less than a handful of times, so I am no master. I epoxied some cork on the top of the board to experiment with a natural surface.  It seems nice but as you can see the cork is not super solid.  Looks like piranas were after me.   I will probably look for a thicker cork in the future. 
So, today I did have a little session on another little beauty...The UFO...Holy Surfboard 0016...

This little beauty has something going for her....She's fresh out of the studio, and At 4'8 she is not the tallest board in the quiver....Not exactly your Maverick's board, but she doesn't shy away from head high surf.  You might think she'd sink in the water, but, dude, she has some fatty foam in there...and bro, this board floats and paddles into waves pretty smoothly. Again, she is flat flat flat.  That translates into good paddling and wave catching.  I had a lot of waves in a short amount of time and she ripped it.  Really, the UFO surfs like a little skate board.  Here's the Craik...She's 4'8 X 19 1/4 wide and 2.8 "thick... with glassed on recycled twin fins (I grinded down the foamies plastic fins and shaped a small profiled twin fin)  The bottom contours are pretty much flat to small single conave channel on the tail and vee projecting from the fins to the rail. She has a green colored epoxy laminate coat and a polyester resin hot coat.  I used 4 and 6 oz cloth on the top and 4 oz on the bottom.  This particular foamie had a double fiberglass stringer.  Thats the Unidentified Flying Object.  This board is for sale.  I am not in a hurry to sell her, but I have a huge quiver at the moment and need the space and the money. 
 I could blog more...but we're gonna keep it short and sweet like the UFO...Happy surfing, whether its in your mind or in the water.