Surfboard Shaping Template History

Bruce "Snake" Gabrielson
Shaper for Wave Trek Surfboards - 1970s

Surfboard designs were, and still are, a combination of shaper skills and surfer inputs. The continuing evolution of both templates and boards goes hand in hand. Templates are made from good boards, and good boards are made from good templates with inputs from good surfers. The shaper is really the artist and engineer who can translate thoughts into reality.

Boards are normally designed and built using a number of different templates, with a new template taken from a design that proves to work very well. This new template can then be used to shape other boards with similar characteristics and virtually any size.

Prior to the foam board, templates were built rugged, often made of heavy 1/4" plywood. Shaping a balsa or redwood board took long hours, with the template sometimes used over and over to check on uniformity of the shape. These older balsa and redwood longboard templates (very rare now) show their wear with many nicks and pencil marks that have been added over time. However, while the board design may change, some angles on a good template are usually used over and over again.

Foam boards require a lighter, more flexible template that can fit closer to the blank, and also to prevent scratching the blank. Using the lighter and thinner fiberboard material available beginning in the mid-sixties for the template's construction also enabled them to be made much easier. The shaper can simply rough cut the design with a jigsaw and then smooth the outline down using a surform and sandpaper.

Early day board (longboard) templates were used primarily to check nose and tail design. Since rails (except for guns) were usually parallel, the middle part of the template wasn't a factor in its use. Therefore, some early day templates looked similar to modern designs, but weren't used the same way. Also, some template designs looked very strange, simply because the shaper put a nose and tail shape at each end of the template, and didn't worry about what the middle of the template looked like. One early day template owned by this author (given to me by Dale Velzy) is only 4 feet long and looks like a template used for a dovetail shortboard design. It was used as primarily as a nose template in the early days. I should also point out that some early redwood board templates were complete nose templates, not half templates as they are now.

The plywood template I donated to Huntington Beach's International Surfing Museum in 1992 is one of three original balsa board templates made and used by Dale in the 50s-60's. It is believed Dale actually used these templates to shape his first foam surfboard. The picture is of other two templates that I still have.

The story of how I got these templates is similar to other contributions Dale has made to influence surfing over the years. Dale's last full time shaping job about 1969 was at Soul Surfboards in Huntington Beach. I was a competition team surfer for Soul at that time, and Dale and I became good friends. After spending many hours in the Soul shaping stall going over designs and shapes, Dale finally got tired of explaining and took me under his wing to teach me how to "do it right". Then when Dale first retired from shaping about 1971 to sell blanks for Bob Rogers at Roger's Foam, he gave me all his shaping equipment, including these templates. I subsequently went on to shape boards for many years at my own company, Wave Trek, using both the tools and the techniques he taught me. I should note that Dale also taught me much of the early day surfing philosophy, something that has all but disappeared in modern day surfing.

Another template I have donated to the International Surfing Museum, marked with a VO bottle drawing, was taken from the first board designed by John Van Ornum at Wave Trek and shaped by me. New templates are seldom made prior to a board proving exceptional in the water. John's board was exceptional, and became the first signature model produced at Wave Trek. The donated template is made from fiberboard, a more flexible and much thinner material than plywood. Most new templates are made this way with a notch in their tail section (see picture). Additionally, special models usually had distinctive inscriptions designating the original developer. Although I haven't seen this "signature" marking practice carried on in recent years, special models nearly always are shaped with a single unique template made from the original board.

In finalizing a template, it is very difficult because of kick and rail design to draw a pattern with the board laying upside down on the fiberboard. Especially for low rail designs, a much closer pattern can be taken from the bottom of a board. The notch must be cut to keep the skag (or skags) from preventing a smooth fit of the new template against the board. When fin boxes eliminated many glassed on fins, template notches were also eliminated. Then the tri-fin and wood fin designs came back, and notches again became commonplace.

Remember, templates only outline 1/2 of the board. Therefore, when drawing the template, place the straight edge of the fiberboard along the center stringer. Also, if the template is made from a board over 8 feet, then the nose and tail must be drawn at each end of the template, with the midpoint smoothed and approximated at the midpoint of the template. This is where other templates are often used on longer (longboard) designs. I recently used this approach with a template I made from a 9'4" longboard. The fiberboard sheet is 4' by 8', so adjustments were made at the midpoint of the template to compensate for the longer board design.

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