|
The No Pop-Outs Story What Is A Pop-Out? By Pop-Out, we’re referring to any surfboard that
is not shaped. In one way or
another, it is popped-out of a mold that duplicates hundreds, thousands,
maybe millions of the exact same shape. This
kind of surfboard cannot be customized by length, dimensions, weight, or bottom
contour. What’s Wrong With That? The End Of Customs Most of the things we buy can’t be customized. The boardshorts you last purchased may have been a little too loose, or too short, or not quite the right color. You bought them because they were the closest to what you wanted that you could find. We don’t like it, but we’ve adjusted to the fact that we simply can’t get most things exactly as we want them. Currently, most surfboards are different. If you prefer a 6'4", you’d buy that size – not a 6'3". If you want it 19 ¼" wide, constructed with two layers of four ounce cloth on top, and a subtle single concave starting at 16" below the nose blending into a double concave between the fins; that’s exactly what you buy. If not one shop in your area has that board, you can choose to special order it and even get an airbrushed replica of your pet iguana right under your front foot! If we choose to embrace molded, Pop-Out surfboards, this
amount of customization and flexibility will no longer exist.
Instead you’ll be forced to just settle for whatever is offered.
A few shapers may still exist to make you a custom board, but the price
will be out of reach for most. Compare
the price of custom made furniture, boats, kayaks, sailboards, etc. to their off-the-shelf
imported counterparts. Slows Innovation A Pop-Out board is frozen in a mold.
It can’t be changed in any way. For
example, a shaper creates a board everyone loves.
He passes it on to the moldmakers. They
create four sizes/four molds of this shape.
Six months later the shaper decides to experiment; he adds a little more
tail rocker, changes the single concave to a subtle vee bottom, and shaves a
quarter of an inch off the nose. Voila!
This board does everything better than the original.
“Mr. Moldmaker, I’ve improved that shape a hundred fold.
Let’s make a new mold.” “Sorry,
shaper dude. We’ve contracted
eighteen pages of full-color ads in national mags and already printed our new
catalog for next year. We ain’t
changin’ nothin’. A new design
would mean we won’t be able to sell the 45,000 we’ve already popped-out of
molds. We’re not in this to make a better surfboard; we want
money.” So, no matter how the
board might be improved by change, the mold can’t change. At least it won’t change until the Pop-Out executives first
squeeze plenty of money out of that one mold. The Ride If you’ve only ridden these boards, you might be
satisfied. However, if you’ve
ever ridden a polyurethane foam/polyester resin surfboard, you’ll notice
differences right away. The Pop-Out
board is stiffer. It feels more
like you’re riding on plastic lawn furniture than on a surfboard. The polystyrene core of these boards also lacks momentum.
When you paddle into a wave and stop paddling, the board wants to stop
moving forward. It lacks the drive and follow-through necessary to cut
through flat, mushy sections. The
foam is also overly floaty, corky, and unsensitive feeling – so much so
that it feels like it slides across a wave instead of penetrating a rail and
carving. The molding process itself
even inhibits the board from being an exact duplicate of its shaped master.
The subtle concaves, vees, panels, channels, the varying
edginess/roundness of the rails are all insignificant details to the Pop-Out
companies. The mold simply can’t
accurately reproduce these minute design intricacies without costing the
manufacturer money and headaches; instead they opt to compromise or leave them
out. Disrespects The Shaper Finally, and most importantly, every time one of these
molded, Pop-Out boards from Slovakia or Thailand is sold, a legitimate real
surfboard shaper has lost a sale. The
more successful the Pop-Out company becomes, the less successful custom
surfboard shapers become. These are
the past, present, and future legends of shaping that we may be pissing on.
They deserve better. That’s why we say: No Pop-Outs. We don’t sell them, and we never will.
|