This conversation in today's episode started because of an email that I received from Dave Parmenter.

It was after he had listened to the episode of Surf Splendor that I published about six months ago with Greg Martz of the Waterman's Guild.

Well, I loved hearing the main thing that it struck me was how deep you were willing to dive on this and providing a public service

for the surfing public, both the consumer and and, you know, on the construction end about

these things. And it also dawned on me how little people actually know about how surfboards

are built.

Parm enter. how surfboards are built. Parmenor is a shaper in San Luis Obispo, California, but for the past 30 years, he sends most

of his boards 230 miles south to have them glassed by Greg Martz, which is an indicator,

of course, of how highly Dave thinks of

Greg and the quality of his work at the Waterman's Guild and the entire team there.

I've had Parmenter on this show a couple of times in the past, and we did talk surfboard design,

but we never really went through the fundamentals, the board building 101.

You know, to kind of begin that, like the entry rocker of this, is that most people in the industry, historically, doesn't matter what era, learn by rote, meaning they just watch other people or get taught something almost like apprentice in industrial era like England about how to

cobble shoes or be a silversmith or a boat builder and they learn the how of something but

they don't know why and so i've been fortunate enough to be in a unique experience to have met a lot of

people on the engineering side of this a lot of people on the engineering side of this, a lot of experts

in the materials, a lot of the people that were actually there, and as a technical writer

for the magazines for many decades, including helming that whole surfboard technical department

at Swell.com in the early 2000 2000s when you could have as much content

as you want because it was online. I was fortunate enough to have all these people at my disposal

to ask questions and provide this as a technical writer. So a lot of this is not so much coming

out of being a shaper myself. It comes from having to go and find a lot of these bits of information and engineering things

...