Surfboard shapers don’t get enough credit. They take hunk of foam and carve them into the most beautiful arrows of fun. The little details that turn an average board into a magic one are held in the minds of shapers. Knowing how to surf well is important for a person making surfboards, because those little tweaks make huge differences in how a surfboard rides. Zack Flores is both an amazing shaper and an amazing surfer. But what happens when every single one of those little tweaks goes out the window? Well, Flores decided to take a raw chunk of surfboard foam out into the lineup to see.
Flores grabbed a raw XTR (extruded polystyrene) foam blank. No glass. No finish. Just foam right out of the factory. XTR is an interesting material. It’s incredibly strong and flexible, but it’s a little harder to work with than some other surfboard materials.
“If you talk in the industry about XTR, people always say it’s a little bit more difficult to shape, just because of the closed cell nature of it,” Shey Yates, president of XTR Epoxy Technology, explained. “When you shape EPS or PU it’s just real easy. Production shapers are banging out as many as they can in a day, and they would run into an XTR and it’s like a brick wall.”
Another issue with XTR is that boards made with it delam pretty quickly. That same closed-cell construction that stops water absorption also leads to a release of gas once the glass is on. There are ways around that, but if you don’t glass it… well, you don’t have to worry about delamination.
Flores knew that this “surfboard” might not go all that well, but something strange happened. He did make a few small adjustments, but nothing that you’d expect would make a surfboard work better.
“I honestly didn’t expect much,” Flores said, “but the results were surprising. This is our XTR blank that we cut down. Turned it into a golfball diffuser bottomed rectangle based off of the Ryan Burch Chunk of Foam.”
Flores, of course, is a much better than the average surfer. He’s talented on pretty much anything, but riding a finless piece of foam this well seems almost criminal.
