We've been talking about board design a lot lately in these reports with the awesome woodies made by Rob Willers and Skep and the performance boards that Graham Carse is world famous for, but we just met up with another chapter in Dunedin's board-building masterclass.
Meet Homa (below). When we first saw Homa's crazy collection of boards we thought he must be experimenting with lots of new shapes and designs. They seemed very, very radical. On closer inspection we discovered a very talented board shaper taking a different direction completely. Homa has been retracing a few apparent "dead-ends" in surfboard history and adding a modern touch to them.
The one he's holding below is called a Hot Curl and it was one of the last board designs before the arrival of the fin. The design is from around 1940 and this blank was built with help from Kiwi board shaper Roger Hall. The tail has a pronounced Vee that enables all the turning – the inch-wide stringer adds strength and that colourful design – that's called a Mexican Blanket glassing job. Homa mixed each colour with resin – each colour is an individual pour. Here's the twist: all the resin has to be timed to cure at the same rate. Yep, there is an extraordinary amount of work that goes into a board like this.
Homa also makes these very short four- and five-foot-long twin fin boards called Simmons boards. They were designed in the '50s by Bob Simmons and were essentially shelved – better designs prevailed according to thinking at the time. Now, more than 60 years later elements of this board's design have crept into mainstream use. For Homa, his wife Tash (see her ripping below) and their family, the fun of riding boards like the Simmons is only just beginning.
See you at the beach ...
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