GRAIN SURFBOARDS INTERVIEW
Mike LaVecchia and Brad Anderson are a couple of guys living on a farm on the coast of Maine who pride themselves on their woodwork. Unlike the typical furniture builders in the area, they’re building surfboards.
All photos by Nick LaVecchia
What drove you to start building wooden surfboards?
Mike: I knew a little about traditional boat building. Growing up snowboarding and skateboarding, I always knew that surfing was in my future. I think it was a combination of the things that I love which turned me on to wooden boards. So one summer a friend and I decided to build a board for fun. We built 1 or 2, trying different methods, After showing them around, some friends and family said they’d love to have me build them one. We never intended to build a business; we were just building stuff to ride.
How did it transition into a business?
Mike: N’East magazine did a little story about a couple guys in southern Maine building wooden surfboards. The Associated Press in Portland saw it, and ran their own story on us. About a week before the story came out, Clark Foam closed down and the whole industry was turned upside down wondering what was going to happen. So our story was picked up immediately by newspapers all around the world. We started getting emails from people all over the country and even military guys in Iraq and suddenly overnight we had 6 orders from people in Florida, Hawaii, and all over. Brad came in as co-owner and we were off.
Why wood instead of foam?
Brad: Well for thousands of years people were riding heavy solid wood surfboards so it’s nothing new. Around the 1920s this guy named Tom Blake started building wood boards hollow. So instead of weighing 200 lbs they weighed more like 90. They were made of plywood and were basically pointy boxes with square sides. Eventually new materials and technologies employing foam, fiberglass & polyester resins were discovered and that brought even lighter weights and infinite 3D shaping possibilities. We’re just bringing it back to the roots of where wood surfboard construction left off but using new techniques that can produce some of the most advanced shapes ever made. It’s great to close the circle.
What makes your boards different from other wood surfboards?
Mike: It’s got an internal wooden frame like a wooden boat which the board gets built around, kind of like a ribcage. The big difference is a milling process, we use only about a third of the wood used in other wood boards. Since we build up the blank around the frame, and don’t hollow out huge chunks of solid wood, what goes into the board stays in the board. Most unique is the way we build the rails hollow & lighter than any other wood board process.
Are there any environmental benefits to this construction?
Brad: It’s still unrealistic to achieve absolute sustainability but we’re far closer than traditional foam board building. First of all we use sustainable-yield local wood. Unlike foam, wood is naturally structural, so we only need one thin glass layer rather than the multiple layers required to give foam strength. That means we use less glass, which takes amazing amounts of energy to produce, and much less resin. The resin we use is also an epoxy instead of polyester so it doesn’t emit volatile greenhouse gases. We’re always experimenting with new potentially green epoxies & cloths. These materials cost a little more and may take a little more time to work with, but obviously it’s worth it to keep finding more ways to impact the ecology less.
Is the reduced environmental impact a good part of why people are buying your boards?
Brad: Look – there’s no avoiding the fact that everyone is going to have to think more about how we’re going to move forward without slamming the planet with everything we do. That means everyone needs to do things differently. This is just one way for surfers to get closer to doing the right thing. People buying our boards are making that choice.
Tell us about the actual business
Brad: We run this place on 100% flex time, as long as people get their work done, it’s all good. So we get people who are fully into what they’re doing. People just want to get involved; we’ve even got people that just donate their time to us. A new friend of ours came in last week and rebuilt the engine in our old truck. He just did it. People are just into what we’re doing.
What attracts people to get so involved?
Mike: Although we work really hard here pretty much seven days a week, in some ways it’s more of a club than it is a business. We don’t say, “Shit, we got to build 20 boards this week!”. The place is partly a hang out, where a group of friends happen to be doing work they want to do. We even offer classes here, where people come in for a week and go home with their own board.
That’s sick! Anyone can just come in and make their own board?
Mike: Yeah and for locals, we also open the shop 2 days a week during winter, so people can just come in and use all our tools. We want to be part of a community that’s about more than just creating a business. That’s what it’s always been about. If you’re not enjoying it and getting something out of it on a personal level, I don’t really understand why you’d do it.
So why do you live in the North East? You’re as far from the So. Cal surfing epicenter as you can get.
Brad: Maine is where the wood grows! Seriously though, we’ve never even talked about moving west, Grain just fits into the lives we were already living here. And if our experience is any guide, the decisions that you make for the right reasons just seem to implicitly be good for you.
What’s your plans for the future?
Brad: Most companies imagine themselves growing right now. We’re a company growing as it needs to. We’ve borrowed almost no money and just have a small line of credit. It’s like instead of going out and getting a mortgage, we’re building a house as we have money to buy the nails, the wood, the siding. It’s growing slowly, that’s an important part of our model’s crawl, walk, run methodology. We don’t follow the traditional model because we want to have fun doing this, and borrowing leads to pressure, and that kind of pressure bleeds the fun right out of everything.
Any last thoughts?
Mike: This little company is our life and we just want it to be as good as it can be. For us, good isn’t measured by “how big”. It’s measured by how fun it is to do and how much people want to be around it, by what level of quality goes out the door, and by our place in our environment and among our community of friends.
Check out their boards at GrainSurfboards.com
