Remember those balsa wood airplanes? The ones you would make on a sunny Saturday morning while visiting your grandpa…just me? Well, as it turns out, the niche business of wooden surfboard making is a lot like those soaring gliders only more elaborate.
A new segment from the Science Channel’s highly popular documentary series, “How It’s Made,” chronicles the assembly process of a wooden craft from the UK’s Otter Surfboards. To anyone that’s familiar with the traditional form of foam and fiberglass shaping, this discipline will seem highly foreign. Whereas a regular board will be widdled down from a solid hunk of foam, this one is hollow and amassed from a set of separate parts. The end result is a beautiful and sleek board – the type you might want to hang in your living room, not necessarily ride. But the boards are meant for waves as a high quality product pioneered from a crossover passion for woodworking and surfing from James Otter himself.
The show, on the other hand, is something else. Somehow this has become an extremely sought after program, despite the monotonous drone of the narrator and the tedious, yawn-inducing descriptions. And there’s an apparent disconnect from the show’s creators and the industries they cover – “When we think of surfboards, we usually picture brightly colored lengths of foam and fiberglass composites.” When was the last time you saw a surfer? The 80s? And does society really care how marbles are made? Contact lenses? I personally never saw the attraction. Every time I see the show, I picture a group of stoned college boys watching in mouth-breathing silence, passing around a pint of ice cream, a haze of happy apathy lingering in the air. But hey, to each his own.
