Based on the westside of Santa Cruz, a wave rich zone with consistent quality surf year-round, we design boards in a collaborative effort between the shaper and the surfers who ride them. Originally, we only used wooden templates, hand tools, a power planer and maybe a sander to shape the boards. Across the industry, this has largely been replaced by a CNC (computer numerical control) machine and hand finishing with little more than a sanding block and screens for fine tuning. We use a KKL machine that cuts boards generated by two different platforms: KKL and Shape3D, along with hand-shaping using the gold standard Skil 100 planer and hand tools.

KKL works by scanning an existing board and reproducing it, with the ability to scale it to different sizes. It works great to take a board that was shaped by hand and make a digital 3d file that can be reproduced; something that has been eternally confounding to handshapers. Part of the beauty of this machine is how heavy, robust and powerful it is. It cuts foam like nothing and has the capacity to mill harder materials. The KKL system of referencing top and bottom is simple and ingenious. What KKL lacks is the ability to digitally customize a scanned model.

This is where Shape3D comes in. With this intuitive program, infinite design potential is in the hands of the shaper. I don't know what more to say - you can literally draw anything on this software. The rub is that you have to know what to draw. A curve can take many paths from nose to tail. We have been using CNC technology consistently for over 20 years, so you can trust that our designs are tight. With Shape3D we can open and copy, or alter Surfcad files going back as far as 2001. Our models are a combination of digital master files generated by hand and computer.