Hi, my name is Josh Hall. I'm 28 years old, born and raised in San Diego California. I own Josh Hall Surfboards, which specializes in customed—100% hand-shaped unique surfboards.
First step I do is pull in any surf board. I cut the board at length from the deck. From there, we just take a pass off the deck. And then, turn it over and take most the thickness at the bottom. When I'm doing that part, I put in the rocker and then I put down the outline and then I cut that out and then make sure everything is square, flipped it over and make sure bottom is flat, I like surfing with a flat bottom.
From there, I’ll thin the nose out if need be, depending what the foil of the nose is. Also, I put the bottom contours in at that point. I’ll clean that up, check in and make sure everything is even. Switch the lights off, turn my overhead light on, put it up on rail and I’ll turn the rail in this form. And then from there, flip the board back over on the bottom, finish sand out the rails, change grits, and finish it out nicer. Flip it over, do the same on the deck. Pull the rails with the screen and mark fins and sign it and you have a surfboard.
For majority of people, they just want a board that’s going to make them have fun and catch waves and go fast and I grew up on long boarding, so anytime I ride a small board, I hate not being able to paddle. The short round fish came back to the surface to the work of Richard Kendon and his shaper Joe, I guess. I mean that—it’s created a firestorm. Like everybody is building that because there is something there that so inherently fun but with all of the fun that we have with the Quad Fish that I’ve been building the last two and half to three years, I just had this idea for a year and a half to put those components together. That board is just a combination. It’s a melting pot of influences.
It surfs how I want to do it. It allows me to get in early. It goes down the line super fast, and it does great cutbacks and just playing through sections that, you know, on a normal fish, you may not may—
Probably the overall width of the board was the biggest adjustment. It’s about an inch and a quarter wider than any of my fish that I normally build. The width was the hard part to like, you know—“Oh maybe we should make these things normal width, but just fuller.” The width, the lengths, and thickness, that’s all refinable, but the idea like for the first prototype thing, came out how I want the width is.
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