In residence

Small fish. Serious guns. A lot of ground in between. Chris Christenson’s shaping education runs through Dick Brewer and Skip Frye, and his range shows it. Longboards, twins, shortboards and boards for the sort of days most people watch from shore.

LoveMachine takes selected Ryan Lovelace designs and makes them available well beyond his own shaping room. The starting point is a board developed by hand. Technology then helps reproduce the design, with skilled builders handling the finishing work. The process is out in the open.

Mark Cormack, better known as Madchook, grew up around his father Neil’s surfboard factory. His own start came glassing for Darren Handley. Nuevo Camino Speed Machines brings that shaping and glassing background together with another long-running obsession: motorsports.

Thirty-five dollars and a kit from a boat-resin shop. That was Mike Minchinton’s entry into boardbuilding in 1969. He sold the first board, bought another kit and kept going. The years that followed took him through Huntington Beach sheds and factories, and into a long shaping relationship with Robert August.

Surfboards and dirt bikes. Foam dust and desert miles. Forrest Minchinton grew up with both, learning the craft around his father Mike and taking it into his own shaping rooms, including one in the Mojave desert. Huntington Beach roots, Costa Rican formative years and plenty of dusty roads between the two.

Your heels and toes do different jobs. Donald Brink shapes accordingly. Originally from Cape Town and based in San Clemente, he builds asymmetrical boards around stance, ankle movement and the way a surfer distributes weight. The outline starts making sense once there’s a person standing on it.

Winner of 2026 STAB magazines alternative surfcraft Electric Acid Surfboard Test (EAST). Ashton began his “adult” life with a doctorate in physical therapy. Four months in the job. Then Ashton Pickle left to make surfboards. The years studying movement stayed with him, feeding an approach built around how each person actually surfs. Different bodies put different demands on a board. Ashton pays attention.

Ryan Sakal was shaping his own boards at fourteen. His father, Ed, had already spent years letting him into the process, giving him a say in the boards going under his feet. Competitive surfing and a family shaping bay made for a pretty direct education: make it, ride it, figure it out.

Jeff McCallum entered boardbuilding at floor level. Sweeping, packing and doing the dirty work at Chris Christenson’s factory before earning his way into shaping and glassing. The lesson stuck: take the time to get good at the work.

Caracas roots. A California shaping room. Oscar Guruceaga brings the two together through Guru Shapes, building boards by hand in Oceanside. His work runs through fish, shortboards and longboards, with classic lines and the individual surfer guiding the shape.

Axel Lorentz started with miniature surfboards before graduating to the kind people trust with their lives. His years at Pukas included guns for Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker and Natxo Gonzalez. Mick Fanning picked his board as runner-up in Stab in the Dark. A useful introduction.

One name, several jobs. Bryston Deleeuw is the builder behind Slab Shapes, with a practice that often takes a board all the way from blank to finished glass. Shaping, laminating, sanding. He has put time into the whole thing.

At fourteen, Alex Knost was preparing blanks for Mark Martinson at Robert August. Years later, he pulled battered sixties longboards off a backyard fence and started reshaping what survived. Brown Microwave Television has roots in that willingness to take something apart and see where it leads.

Kris Hall started shaping at sixteen, with Phil Edwards, Dewey Weber and Tyler Hatzikian among his reference points. Add jazz, old cars and Johnny Cash, and you get a feel for where his head is. South Bay surfing with a taste for a well-drawn line.

Before Jive, Jacob Ells worked on lasers. The precise patterns he drew as an engineer eventually found their way into the geometric airbrush work wrapping his boards. Add a background in snowboarding and an early obsession with displacement hulls, and those unusual outlines start to make sense.

Shea, Boardroom show 2023 winner “Best in show” began his path through the bay with a curious mind into a backyard shed in 2008. He wanted to ride the hulls, logs and fishes tucked into surfing’s less obvious corners, so he started making them. That search still runs through Somma Special Designs: different boards, different sensations, more reasons to paddle out.

Twisted rockers. Offset rails. Fin placements that make you look twice. Ventura’s John Simon puts a lot of calculation into his experiments. His EAST design, conceived with Ryan Burch for Mick Fanning’s Electric Acid Surfboard Test, approaches the toe side and heel side of a turn differently.

Wood has a job to do in a Jeff Beck board. The man behind Nine Lights builds with wood and foam, exploring how construction changes the ride as much as the outline does. Every board passes through his hands from start to finish.

John Robichaud builds Olero boards in small batches, by hand, with a clear interest in making more of an ordinary session. The range moves through shortboards, midlengths and logs. Classic outlines get worked over with the next wave in mind.

Micah Beutz started packing boards at Christenson while he was still in high school. Factory work led into glassing, resin tints and shaping, including work with Chemistry’s Jason Bennett. Under SBMB, Surfboards by Micah Beutz, he brings the whole process under one pair of hands.

Andy Seidensticker’s education started with ding repairs, factory work and foiling fins with Curtis Hesselgrave. Three decades of shaping followed, with Costa Rica becoming a large part of the story. His interest in epoxy construction started early. He wanted different boards under his feet, so he made them.

Maui raised. New York factory educated. Drew Austin joined his brother Aaron at Kings Glassing after struggling to get a start in California’s board factories. He began sanding in their Brooklyn workshop, learning through the work and helping build the operation from the inside.

A poetry degree, a carpenter father and a past life making glass chandeliers. Paul J. Schmidt brought an unusual set of tools into surfboard building. At Paul Surf, he shapes, glasses and finishes each board himself inside a converted shipping container in Rockaway Beach.