Like a phoenix rising from the ashes! Photos: YouTube//Screenshot
Ryan Burch makes surfboards that make people do a double take. They’re beautifully crafted things; functional works of art that hang on the wall well and ride waves even better. One such head-turning shape is the Pickle Fork, a surfboard with a carved out nose that looks, to be honest, pretty freaking bizzare. According to those who’ve figured it out, however, it’s a bit of a game changer. Which is why Zack Flores, an amazing shaper/surfer in his own right, decided to attempt to make one of his own out of an old, dusty thruster from the ’90s.
“It never really worked great for our local waves, so instead of letting it collect dust, I had an idea,” Flores said. “What if I chopped it up and turned it into a Ryan Burch–inspired pickle fork surfboard?”
Making a surfboard isn’t all that hard, but making a surfboard that works well sure is. Flores knows what he’s doing when he’s in the shaping room, and it’s fascinating to listen to him talk about what he’s doing as he’s doing it.
“In this video,” he explains, “I break down the entire process — from cutting into a perfectly rideable board, reshaping the outline, dialing in the rocker, and seeing whether this experiment actually works in the water. This isn’t a step-by-step tutorial, it’s a real surfboard shaping experiment with no guarantees.”
Once the experiment was done, the only thing left to do was take it for a test drive. “It works so much better than it did before we turned it into a Burch,” Flores said afterwards. “So we can confirm that this design theory works well.”
Was there ever any doubt?
