A New Twist on Surfboard Building

Local legend shaper Eric Arakawa is starting a new surfboard company called Arcomi (a modification of the Greek archomai, for "beginning"), in the Waialua Sugar Mill.


It's a different sort of board company in that it's based on the craftsmen involved. There are no "ghost shapers" here. Each person involved in the process has a name and a face.


With the current trends toward the "pop-out, made in China" and the "pro-board-stretched-to-your-size," Eric and his crew are going back to basics, back to a time when you knew your shaper and glasser, and they made you a genuine custom board for your style of surfing that made you really want to go out there and surf.


The idea is that these guys all work together to develop new ideas as a group. They are making some unusual designs, and doing some classic work like old school glassing and pin lines. I've been shooting quite a bit of material trying to document the creation of their project.


Eric is a very creative guy, and he came up with some interesting ideas for photographing the surfboard building process. I liked his idea of light coming out of a resin bucket so much that Eric and I ended up taping a Speedlite to the bottom of a paper bucket and shooting his glasser, Fermin Lagonell, pouring magenta-tinted resin onto a board.


Since the resin has a very short working time, we knew we'd ruin the glass job, so we used a reject board and just kept pouring resin onto it. I think we came up with something unusual, a new twist on the theme. Now if I can just get this resin off my camera gear....