The Reef Board Build Off: San Diego board builders shape for charity

Surfing’s inspiration, surfboards imagined by shapers but rarely designed, will take center stage attention at the Action Sports Retailer (ASR) trade show this month. Thirteen surfboards by 12 shapers plus one from a Reef team rider will be auctioned for charity. “We’re still young with this event, so we’re still experimenting,” Reef Strategic Marketing Manager Bob Tanner said.
    The event is the Reef Board Build Off.
    It’s a competition showcasing a selection of San Diego’s finest board builders. Surfboard designers make so many boards with the same materials, the same shape over and again, but in their heads are ideas for an artistic project, that one design they’ve been wanting to try but never quite had the time nor forum to showcase. The Board Build Off gives them that opportunity.        Reef provides each shaper with $500 for the production of each board for the event. The shape, size, color and materials used in the production of the board are entirely at the discretion of the shaper, but it’s mandatory that all boards in the competition have one universal characteristic – each needs to be ride-able.  
For shapers like Rusty Preisendorfer, this type of competition affords him the opportunity to make a multi-wood surfboard with his iconic R-dot set in mother of pearl below the glass. “The board I made last year, I had in the back of my mind for a couple years,” he said. This year he’s adapting his EPS/Epoxy combo with a different flavor of artwork. He said it is science from one field and art from another. The point, he said, is to meet the demand of a good-looking board.
    The pure white look of a new polyurethane (PU) board is tough to attain with epoxy, so to color the board he adapted an artistic theme of San Diego. How it looks will remain a secret until the event.
“The look and feel of the paint is a lot richer and deeper, not in a spiritual sense, but in a visual sense,” he said. Rusty has made it a point to get past the cosmetics of surfboards. He says his EPS/Epoxy is structurally superior, but to please surfers he needs to create epoxy boards with artwork they accept. With the money that Reef gave him for materials, Rusty can meet that aesthetic demand with the board that will be auctioned at the Build Off.
    Rusty’s San Diego artwork theme parallels the idea for this year’s event: Reef, a San Diego based company, sponsors the Board Build Off at ASR in San Diego to which only San Diego shapers are invited. The most difficult part of sponsoring the event is selecting the shapers who will participate. “It’s absolutely the hardest part,” Tanner said.
A quick look at the yellow pages gives an indication of the amount of shapers in San Diego. “There’s always someone whose gonna feel left out,” Tanner said. The Reef team picked each shapers based on the board manufacturer’s history, their contributions to evolving design, their artistic ability and their commitment to shaping. Gordon & Smith, for example, began board making in San Diego during the 1950s.  “It would be sacrilegious not to include them,” Tanner said.
    Of the 13 shapers, Reef will also include an in house, representative shaper. This year it is long-time team rider Rob Machado. Admittedly, Rob tends to ride boards more than shape them, and his board design for this year’s event reflects it. Machado’s contest submission is made for surfers 150 pounds and lighter. “It’s probably a board I’ll make for my kid one day,” Machado said.
He said it’s a 5'2" knock-off of an Al Merrick board, with curvy rails and very little rocker – a fast board good for head-high, hollow waves at a beach break. The board’s top is painted an icy blue and Machado said he had fun painting the bottom with a lot of color. “We did a nice little tint job.  It looks cute,” Machado said. The surfer mixed about five buckets of resin with color, and then let the colors mix on the board. “You don’t really stir it, it just kind of swirls around and marbleizes. When you put it on the surfboard you don’t know what you’re gonna get.”
    The board will sell with the other 12 for charity. Whichever shaper raises the most money earns a $2,000 check. Last year’s event took place at the Hansen/Machado Surf Classic and those involved were surprised at the artistic creativity that each shaper put into their board as well as with the amount of people who came out to see the boards. “The last board build off we did was amazing. I was blown away,” Machado said.
    It’s up to the shapers to decide which charity will receive the money from the auctioning of their boards, but last year’s shapers donated to Hurricane Katrina relief and local organizations such as Surfrider Foundation.
    The ASR trade show will run the weekend of January 25-27 at the San Diego Convention Center and as Rusty said, “I can’t wait to see what everyone else makes.”