Asher Pacey knows what works, and Exo Flex is right up his alley. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Matt Parker of Album Surfboards isn’t like every other shaper. He’s an experimenter. He tries things, tweaks things, and scraps things that don’t work. Trial and error is the name of the game in shaping, and Parker has done a lot of trials. His trial to error ratio, however, is low. He knows what makes surfboards work, and he knows how to take his knowledge from his brain and put it into a surfboard. Surfboard technology is constantly changing, and a recent addition to Album Surfboards is something called Exo Flex.
In short, it replaces a traditional wood stringer. Traditional stringers do offer some flex, but not as much as some other materials. With flex comes kinetic energy, and kinetic energy is a good thing in a surfboard.
“Exo Flex is a patented construction system that enhances your surfboard,” explains Ryan Campbell. “It’s kind of like a leaf spring in a car, a truck, or a trailer. What it does is through every turn — bottom turn or top turn — the more force you give it through a turn, the more spring back it gives you, so the quicker you’ll go through that turn. An extra bit of spice.”
Here, Asher Pacey, a guy who knows what he likes in a surfboard and sticks with it, shows how Exo Flex performs. Of course, it’s impossible to really know how it performs after watching someone like Pacey surf it — Pacey is a hell of a lot better than the average surfer — but if someone as picky as he is has been riding it for a while, you can bet it’s not a bad thing.
