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The woods of southern Maine are an unlikely place to find a surfboard manufacturer, but that’s where Grain Surfboards calls home. Grain has been producing wooden surfboards in York, Maine, since 2005 — and it shows in the well-worn shop. It’s stuffed to the brim with precision-cut surfboard parts, wood stock, wood planes, finger planes, spoke shaves, saws and drills. The smell of fresh-cut wood and glue wafts through the air. Wood shavings overflow from bins and line the floor around the work stations. The entryway to the shop consists of a kitchen, dining room table, a small rack of merchandise and a display of Grain surfboards. It feels less like a commercial surfboard manufacturer and more like your savvy neighbor’s DIY workshop.
Wooden surfboards might sound strange, but foam-based surfboards, the most common construction today, are a small blip in the overall history of surfing. In the sport’s almost 250-year existence, fiberglass and foam surfboards only occupy a mere 69 years. Before the foam era, surfers made their own boards from what wood they had available. Grain is taking people back to the roots of surfing, making wooden boards with the help of modern technologies. “We call that ‘re-evolution,’” says Brad Anderson, Grain’s co-owner, with a chuckle.
Grain Surfboards started out life in the basement of fellow co-owner Mike Lavecchia’s home. He had only made a handful of hollow wooden surfboards when a profile of the company was published by a small New England-based magazine. Shortly thereafter, the famous Clark Foam, one of the largest producers of foam surfboard blanks in the country, closed its doors, dealing a huge blow to the foam surfboard industry. When Grubby Clark closed his doors, the operation was worth $40 million, but environmental hazards and run-ins with California’s environmental agencies were leading people in search of a “greener” solution. Around the same time, the Associated Press picked up a story featuring Grain, and word spread. The timing of the story was a perfect storm for the small startup. “At that same time [as the closing of Clark Foam], being born on the coast of Maine is this little enterprise that is about exactly the opposite,” Anderson said, comparing his company to Clark Foam.
“We love working with our hands. We love wood and we love this process.”
That’s not to say that Grain Surfboards is purely a product of circumstance. Both Mike and Brad come from wooden boat building backgrounds, which provided them with the skills to build hollow wooden surfboards. With symmetrical knots, contrasting wood stringers, beautiful glassed-on fins and the Grain logo burned into the deck, the finished products are the work of masters. “We love working with our hands. We love wood and we love this process,” says Lavecchia. While foam boards are quicker to shape and can be reproduced in mass quantities, he and Anderson have always put the craft above expediency — and the same principles apply to the raw materials they use.
