Journal
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
The latest news and stories from our workshop, and beyond.
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 wooden surfboard that he's been shaping this week. Stamping the surfboard with the Otter Workshops logo is the final job on a "Build-Your-Own" workshop to-do list, and it's as important and celebrated as the topping out ceremony on any building. It signifies the completion of something and is a...
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...
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 things that we still use today, started sticking bits of crushed shells, sand and even seeds onto parchment using natural gums. They would then use this to delicately remove small amounts of material from surfaces such as wood, something that we're still doing to this day. Woodworkers use all...
This week we're going to tell you about how we use walnut in our surfboards. You may have noticed how we use hardwood accent strips on the deck and...
This past week has been a busy one in the workshop here at Otter surfboards, and it's been absolutely brilliant. We've been running another one of...
British like cricket: that was the over-arching theme when we set out to design and build a more performance orientated mal to sit at the...
Let us introduce you to the humble surform. Many of you may already be familiar with them, but we're going to take a closer look at this...
We're going to start our "Surfboard Focus" series of blogs this week (we'll be looking at one board every month or so), and because it's a Friday, we're going with "all the f's" and doing a Fetch Fish Friday. The Fetch is a 5'10" x 20 3/4" x 2 3/4" classic outlined fish, with twin keel fins and a deep swallow tail. The first wooden board that James built was a fish, and the Fetch is the direct descendant of this original Otter surfboard....
Ordinarily, it takes a few weeks for us to work our way through the various stages in constructing a wooden surfboard, as we usually have several on...
Early last year this project began with excited talks from Tom Clarke, the head Gardener from Trelissick, who'd recently felled a storm damaged tree...
