SURFBOARD CONSTRUCTION

Cutting-Edge Combination of Nature and Technology When most people think of Firewire, they think of TIMBERTEK. These are the brown, wooden-decked surfboards that first put the company on the map. Combining lightweight EPS blanks with a laminated wooden skin and proprietary parabolic rails, these boards look good and perform great. They are strong, lightweight, and snappy, utilizing the strength of paulownia wood to supplement the strength and flex of the EPS foam and epoxy resin. Paulownia is a fast-growing tree that produces strong, light timber, perfect for use in surfboard construction. By utilizing this wood in their construction process, Firewire...

Tell Us About The Thunderbolt  Surfboards You’ve Ridden... Thunderbolt. Well Thunderbolt came into my life about five years ago when Mr. Sumitomo, Yu Sumitomo gave me a phone call that began my journey with the Thunderbolt team. A good friend of mine that I’ve surfed professional longboards with for years, Kapono Nahina, gave me the original call that told me I needed to try this construction. I went to Hawaiian South Shore and that’s when I started my relationship with Dave. His awesome staff down there set me up and I tried my first Thunderbolt Harley Ingleby HIHP model designed by Billy Tolhurst. It changed...

…Lost’s C4 Board Construction Along with a wide variety of fun, creative shapes, Matt Biolos and the team at …Lost  have revolutionized the surfboard industry with their C4 construction process. C4 boards are built with sustainably harvested cork that adds extra strength and dampens wind chatter and high-speed vibrations, yet maintains the lightweight feel of a modern shortboard. These composite boards use a 1.5-pound EPS foam core wrapped with the harvested cork and layers of fiberglass, adding tensile strength to the deck without creating the flicky feel that a lot of epoxy boards suffer from. The best part is that...

    Mark Nelson founded Carve Sports, Inc. / VERITAS SURFCRAFT in 2014.  Since that time, Mark and his team have partnered with Yu Sumitomo of Thunderbolt Technologies, and elite longboard surfers including CJ Nelson, Harley Ingleby, Ben Skinner, Taylor Jensen and Kai Sallas.  Together with their shapers, this team has created exceptional lineups of high performance and classic longboards and fun shapes and established distribution of their boards in most major surf markets around the world.  Brands include CJ Nelson Designs, Harley Ingleby Series by Tolhurst Surfboards, SkinDog Surfboards, Flying Diamonds Fins, Taylor Jensen Series and Kai Sallas Longboard...

Firewire is known for leading the surf industry in terms of modern, high-tech board construction, and recently they have added a number of different construction options to their boards. Two of the most popular—LFT and Helium—provide similar all-around benefits such as light weight and durability, but also have their own specific advantages, depending what you are looking to do on your board. Rob Machado has been designing boards for Firewire for the past few years, and has a lot of experience on both types of construction. He recently did a little video to explain the difference between the two, and...

WHAT IS HYFI? Our unparalleled epoxy technology, HYFI, is a unique multi-layer construction that feels like nothing else out there. Think of it as a futuristic exoskeleton for a surfboard that allows it to be lighter and stronger than ever before, while still maintaining the ideal spring-loaded flex for maximum performance. Jason Stevenson and his JS label (famous for the tractor logo) have been producing some of the most high-performance surfboards on the planet for more than two decades. No one questions the design elements of these boards, and a number of guys on the world tour ride them, including...

Helium Hydroshort  California’s Timmy Reyes has been a free surfing fixture for two decades. From his young days as an up-and-coming grom to his current legend status as a feral explorer of frigid barrels, Timmy has been shaping surf culture since he was an adolescent, and his edits continue to get us pumped up to drive a bit farther, pull on some rubber, and have an adventure. As it turns out, Timmy Reyes is influential in the surfboard design realm as well. Timmy got on one of Kelly Slater’s Hydroshorts (made by Tomo) a few years back, built in Firewire’s LFT...

There are few board designs that have stranger stories than the …Lost Rocket. Back in the mid-2000s, Shane Beschen needed a board for his mini-grom Noah, and together with fellow …Lost pro surfer and shaper Noah Budroe scraped a broken blank into a straight-railed, low-entry rocker, wide-tailed, super-concaved speed demon. But then Shane ended up borrowing the board from his son, and found that the thing went ballistic. He brought the design to …Lost, where the design team tweaked it a bit and created what came to be called the Rocket—one of the most popular boards of the late 2000s....