Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
Last weekend we temporarily relocated our workshop. For one day, on Saturday, we did what we normally do and covered the floor with sawdust whilst guiding a lovely group of people through the stages of creating their own bodysufing handplane, but in the Patagonia Store in Covent Garden, London, rather than at our workshop in Cornwall. Ben and his team had very kindly cleared a space for us amongst their winter surf range and "heritage...
We're heading back up to London, but this time we're loading our tool kit and a stack of timber into the back of the van ready to put on a...
Kingsley's just finished off his "Desert" Island Hopper after a week of hard work, fuelled by lots of cups of tea. He's really pleased with his...
It’s been a good summer this year. Memories of past years of howling nor’westerly winds and incessant mizzle were banished and we spent the...
We’re closing the doors to the workshop next week (w/c Monday 16th September), loading the van and driving up to the Big Smoke. It...
A few changes have been afoot at Otter Surfboards this week…if you browse around our site you'll see that the first of the Autumnal updates have appeared in the form of some new workshops that we'll be running here. We will now be running one-day workshops for handplanes (£110) and bellyboards (£140) on select Saturdays throughout the year, so you'll be able to come in and spend a day with us producing a lovely wooden sled to enhance...
Bellyboards are right up there with buckets and spades, windbreaks and the sound of an ice cream van as a pillar of the classic British Summer....
"We very nearly spent the week sleeping on a boat off the south coast, but unfortunately it was sold just a few weeks ago" Tim replied when asked...
This is the second blog post that we are publishing in our short "Down The Line" series, which aims to share with you (our friends, customers and...
The awning was already here when we moved in to the workshop here at Krowji; a few lengths of 2"x4" with some clear plastic tarpaulin pinned to it...
The name paipo (pronounced pipe-oh) is derived from the Hawaiian "Pae Po'o" which means to surf headfirst. Essentially these surfboards are simply thin wooden bellyboards surfed prone in exactly the same manner they were when Captain James Cook dropped anchor in a Hawaiian bay in 1778, when he described the locals riding waves prone on boards that were between 3' and 6' in length. These boards were popular in Hawaii and elsewhere were...
The making of anything is likely to result in some wastage of materials, and wooden surfboards are no exception. But how much you waste and what...
This past month it has finally felt as though Summer has arrived here in the south west of the UK - on some days at least! And when we get a high...
This afternoon Glenn Bowker carefully lined up an inked rubber stamp, paused to take a breath, and then pressed it firmly down onto the deck of the...
Poplar is a popular choice when we ask customers which hardwoods they would like to have laid up into the deck and bottom skins of their surfboards....
It's Friday afternoon which means both blog-time and also, during "build-your-own" workshop weeks, the culmination of a week's hard work and the completion of a new wooden surfboard. Shane came an awful long way to build his surfboard with us. He's from Sydney's Northern Beaches and is in Europe for a few weeks vacation which includes spending a week with us growing a surfboard from a stack of wooden pieces into the 5'10 Fetch fish that...
We were delighted to welcome 10xEuropean Longboard Champion Ben Skinner into the workshop this week to get started designing a wooden big wave gun...
It's officially Spring, and that means that for many of us the prospect of being fully immersed in the sea rather than floating above it on a...
Abrasive paper has been around for a long, long, time. Back in the thirteenth century the Chinese, in amongst inventing all sorts of other clever...
