Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
Creating anything with an organic material such as wood is both challenging and hugely rewarding, particularly if your aim is to work with and show off wood as a medium rather than hide it. Woodblocks have been used in printmaking for millennia, with the earliest surviving example originating from China and dating back to 220AD. Ordinarily a carved wooden block is used to repeatedly print onto paper or cloth, with the woodblock itself seldom...
When making surfboards, accuracy, symmetry and attention to detail are essential considerations. Our wooden surfboards use a skin-on-frame...
Last summer we received an e-mail from one of our friends at Surf Simply; Kerianne, their logistics manager, was spending a summer on Long Island,...
We’ve never hung a Christmas wreath on the workshop doors here, but we thought that this year we ought to make an effort to get into the festive...
It’d be fair to say that we’re fans of a proper tea break here at Otter Surfboards; downing tools for ten minutes a couple of times during the day and drawing breath over a cup of tea and, if we’re lucky, a slice of cake. And we think that we’ve found our favourite cake.
Surfboards vary in appearance as much as the human beings that use them; many become a vehicle for expression both in the way that they are ridden...
We’ve had a rather unusual surfboard stored in the workshop for the past year or so; it’s a twelve feet long replica of a Tom Blake style...
Our final workshop of 2015 has just wrapped up, and it was a great week to finish the year on. Every single one of the “Make-Your-Own” wooden...
Tealing We’d like to introduce all of you to The Coaster, the latest addition to our range and a surfboard that we’ve been struggling to keep...
The British summer holidays are bellyboard season; that time of year when old plywood boards are pulled out of the backs of sheds and garages, dusted off and carried out to waist deep water to catch a whitewater wave back to shore on. These four foot by one foot surfcraft are as quintessentially British as eating an ice-cream behind a wind-break, and have a loyal following that spans generations, demonstrated perfectly by the huge popularity...
July was a good and busy month for wooden surfboard workshops here at Otter, and at the very end of the month we welcomed Marc Koska to the...
Last weekend we joined the wonderful team from Surfers Against Sewage at Somersault Festival in North Devon for a weekend of mud, music and...
For many families, school summer holidays involve going away somewhere and spending a week or so together making memories and enjoying each others...
A few weeks before Claire arrived in the UK from California, a large package arrived at the Otter Workshop addressed to her. When we opened it...
A few weeks ago Chris arrived at the workshop to spend a week helping us machine timber in preparation for a "Make-Your-Own" wooden surfboard course, with part of his final degree project in his car. It was a circular 3D map of the beach and point at Godrevy, the National Trust beach just down the coast from us. We knew that he'd been working on a series of these 3D landscapes throughout his third year on the Contemporary Craft BA(hons)...
It's not a race to complete the list of daily tasks involved in making your own wooden surfboard with us here, but you'd never have known that if you...
Kurt arrived at the workshop on Monday morning, having driven his pick-up truck half way across Europe from Switzerland to come and spend a week...
It’s lovely catching up with friends who have built surfboards with us in the past – that’s why we throw our “AGM” celebration every...
