Zack Flores wants to end the debate. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Surfboards are made of a lot of different things these days. We’ve come a long way from the koa and wiliwili wood that the ancient Hawaiians used. Then came balsa and paulownia and redwood and cedar. Tom Blake tried to fix the weight issue with his cigar box boards that were hollow, but it wasn’t until fiberglass and resin and polyurethane foam became the norm that surfboards felt like they do today.
Progress marches on, as they say, so now we’ve got a glut of different materials to choose from when it comes to shaping a surfboard. Polyurethane (PU), expanded polystyrene (EPS), and extruded polystyrene (XTR) are most commonly used, so Zack Flores, a shaper extraordinaire and a guy who absolutely rips, decided he’d do a little test to figure out which one is the best.
“In this video, we put XTR, EPS, and PU head-to-head to find out,” Flores wrote. “From surfing all three blanks raw to getting all three boards shaped and glassed, we put them through real-world testing to see how each construction holds up.”
Those tests included some of the most common rigors, like “durability, strength, weight, travel abuse, and ultimately, how they actually perform in the water.”
