The Mental Tools - Lesson 4

Comfort vs. Intimacy. This article covers volume and flotation in surfboard design — how much foam/thickness a board has and how that shapes the surfing experience. What are ...

Suction + Tension = Hang Ten

Walking on Water - Tom Wegener tells you how. The science behind your next noseride is more complex than you might think. Enjoy this read which was first published by JB in Pacific Longboarder, Vol...

If you can imagine it, you can make it!

Twenty -two years ago, Tom made seventeen surfboards between 14 and 18 feet in search of the ultimate glide. From toothpicks to 16 foot surfboards and the ancient olo, every board was different, an...

Surfing a Toothpick

Take some old foam and make it new again. Tom builds a scaled-down Toothpick for Noosa's Hunter Williams and gives a discarded surfboard core a new life, using paulownia wood sheets.

Hollow Wood Surfboards

After moving to Noosa in 1999, Tom was introduced to paulownia, a lightweight timber similar to balsa but with a key advantage: it doesn't absorb salt water, making it far more durable for surfboar...

What is in a surfboard?

This is a rich, personal history of surfboard materials told through Tom's own shaping experience over several decades. The article centres on the long rivalry between Polyurethane (PU) and Polysty...

Lessons from Tom Blake

This is a warm personal piece by Tom Wegener about the pioneering waterman Tom Blake (1902–1994), written after receiving a biography of Blake as a gift from his father....

The Mental Tools - Lesson 3

In this piece Tom explains his theory on the physics behind how a surfer can "hang ten". The key is that the back two-thirds of the board engages the energy within the wave rather than sliding alon...

Surfing History in a Tiny Nutshell

Surfing — Ancient Roots, Modern Boom! Surfing is way older than California. Long before surf culture went global, people were riding waves everywhere — Japan, Tonga, India, China, Peru, and possibl...

You're Going to Need Tools

First, the mental tools. Curiosity, understanding the energy of a wave, basic elements of surfboard design; floatation and volume, flex and rigidity, dynamics of rail curves (how they pull and rele...