The Storyboard

Project Info

The designers planned this project to explain the process of how they build their surfboards and why they had chosen to build wooden surfboards as opposed to polyurethane ones, as is the industry standard. They followed the process right from the material being harvested, through the sawmill and their workshop and on to the finished product.

Otter Surfboards are built using a skin and frame technique, so they went about the task of making their own plywood from the cedar planks they picked for the framework and preparing the skins and rail strips. They had it in mind to display the board with its top skin off, so decided to engrave a poem onto the internal framework that explained the story of the project.

The designers use western red cedar in the build of all of their boards because of its durability and how light it is as well as how well it behaves as thin flat boards. Although once constructed, the cedar makes the boards easy to shape because of how soft it is, it does cause some problems with the variation in density where the winter growth meets the summer growth. And with engraving onto the cedar plywood, the designers did sadly end up with some tear out at critical points. Luckily it is all still easily legible though.