The Board Project | Andras Hejj

When Noah and I walked into the shaping bay to make it official, one of the guys was halfway through fixing a busted board. He didn’t stop for us. He just talked us through the repair as he went, and Noah stood next to me and watched the whole thing in complete silence.

I took that as a good sign.

The deal itself happened on the phone before that. I called the crew at Santosha, we talked about how Noah actually surfs, and only then did I pitch the project (the backstory is in my last post). By the end we had a rough structure and an agreement that we’d get our hands a lot dirtier than we’d first planned.

The board is ordered. The raw foam blank takes about eight weeks to reach the island, which is a long wait but a useful one: we get to prepare before we touch a single tool. Once it lands, a few weeks of shaping, painting and glassing. Twelve weeks, start to finish.

Noah is 8, so this has to feel like an adventure, not a school curriculum. I also want us to take the craft seriously enough that we walk away having learned something real. We aren’t there to spectate.

The structure

I want this to be something we do together, not one more chore wedged between school and dinner. So every week, we commit to three things:

🤝Apprentice with Daniel and the team. Ask questions, watch closely, get it wrong, get corrected, go again.

🛠️Do the homework between sessions. Read up, sketch designs, gather materials, practice the technique.

✍️Write it down. What we learned, what blew our minds, what turned out harder than it looked.

The rules stay simple: just enough scaffolding that the memories and the lessons stick, and not a plank more.

The timeline

Twelve weeks, three tracks running side by side: shaping, designing, documenting.

Week 1done

First Contact

Meet the shapers. Agree on the dimensions. Order the blank.

Week 2~3 hours

Board Anatomy

Daniel takes a board apart for us (with words, not a saw). Stringers, rails, foam densities, rocker.

Week 3~3 hours

Design Theory

Why our board is shaped the way it is. How bottom contours and tail shapes boss the water around.

Week 4~3 hours

Watch the Masters

Shadowing Daniel while he shapes a different board. Learning how to look at foam.

Week 5~4 hours

Graffiti & Flame Concepts

Noah wants flames. Non-negotiable. We study street art and start sketching on paper.

Week 6~4 hours

The Posca Pen Dojo

Sourcing the paint pens and practicing on scrap cardboard before we touch foam.

Week 7~4 hours

Tools & Tactile Training

Getting a feel for the planer and the surform. Sanding practice on offcuts, where mistakes are free.

Week 8~3 hours

Locking in the Artwork

Picking the winning flame design, drawing it out at full scale, one last dry run.

Week 9~5 hours

The Blank Arrives (First Cuts)

The foam is here. We fire up the tools and make our first permanent marks.

Week 10~5 hours

Sculpting & Symmetry

Sanding. Then more sanding. Trusting our hands to find the symmetry in the rails.

Week 11~5 hours

Painting the Flames

Noah takes over. We transfer the art to the raw foam and seal it so it survives the glassing.

Week 12~3 hours + 🌊

Glass, Seal, Surf

Watching the fiberglass-and-resin alchemy, putting the fins in, paddling out.

Week 1: First Contact

✓ DONE🎯 Meet the shapers, choose the board

Done and dusted. We turned up at the Santosha shaping bay, introduced ourselves, and worked out what kind of board actually makes sense for Noah right now.

Shake hands with the crew at Santosha Surf and understand what’s actually possible.Dial in the board dimensions based on Noah’s weight, his skill level, and our local break.Pull boards off the racks together and steal ideas for the shape.Pull the trigger and order the foam blank (cue the 8-week waiting game).Journal: what the bay looked, smelled and sounded like, and what Noah is most hyped about.

The Santosha shaping bay with boards on the wall, tools on the bench, and foam dust on the floor. — Week one smelled right from the doorway: foam dust, tape, tools, and people who know why a tiny curve matters.

Week 2: Anatomy

~3 hours🎯 Learn the vocabulary of the craft

You can’t shape something you can’t name. So first, vocabulary: the parts of a board, what the stringer actually does, why the curve matters. The best way to learn it is with our hands on a real board while Daniel talks.

Bay visit: get Daniel to grab a finished board and walk us through the anatomy (nose, tail, rails, stringer, rocker, fin clusters).Geek out on the foam: find out exactly what our blank is made of, why they chose it, and the trade-offs of different densities.Read through the D’Arcy Surfboard Anatomy page so the words stick.Have Noah draw a board from memory and label every single part he can remember.Journal: which parts did we not even know existed? What surprised us most?

Checkpoint: If Noah can explain to Lara what a “stringer” is, and get it right, Week 2 is a win.

Week 3: Design Theory

~3 hours🎯 Understand why water cares about curves

Nothing on a surfboard is there to look cool (the paint job aside). Every curve does something to the water. A concave bottom channels it differently from a flat one. A sharp rail lets go of it faster than a soft, rounded one. This week is the physics of our board specifically.

Sit down with Daniel and make him defend every design choice on our board: rail profile, bottom contour, tail shape.Feel the difference for real: put a retro fish, a high-performance shortboard and a classic log side by side, and run our hands down all three sets of rails.Study the Greenlight guide on rail design to connect what Daniel tells us with the theory behind it.Journal: sketch a rail in cross-section. Try to explain concave vs. flat bottoms in one sentence.

Checkpoint: Can Noah tell Lara why our board needs a concave bottom instead of a flat one?

Daniel explaining the rail and foam blank to Noah in the shaping bay. — The anatomy lesson works because he can touch the thing while Daniel explains it. A rail stops being a word in a diagram.

Week 4: Watch the Pros

~3 hours🎯 Watch how a shaper works

Before either of us picks up a power tool, we watch someone who knows what he’s doing. Our board isn’t involved this week. We stand back, watch Daniel work on whatever’s on the racks, and try to pick up his rhythm.

Post up in the bay while Daniel shapes: stay out of the way, but ask questions while the dust flies.Get him to narrate as he goes: why he starts where he does, how he checks symmetry by eye, how he knows when to put the tool down.Track down Fish: The Surfboard Documentary for the culture around fish boards.Journal: how Daniel uses his body, and what blew Noah’s mind the most.

Checkpoint: Can Noah do a convincing Daniel impression, power-planer stance and all? Bonus points if he knows why the stance matters.

Week 5: Graffiti + Flame Sketches

~4 hours🎯 Find the aesthetic and put pencil to paper

Noah has been very clear: he wants flames on his board. I’m all for it. But if we’re doing hot-rod flames, we need to work out how street art survives the move from flat paper to a curved, three-dimensional canvas.

Get the guys at the bay to show us some painted boards, and work out which designs pop and which ones get lost under the glass.Pull visual references from hot rod culture, 90s skateboard decks, and local street art.Scroll through the 360Guide surfboard design ideas to see what other people have pulled off.Let Noah loose with a pencil and paper and see how many versions of a flame he can come up with.Journal: pin up the sketches we keep coming back to.

Checkpoint: Can he show Lara his favorite sketch and confidently explain why it looks dynamic instead of flat?

The flames eventually lost to a duck. Any plan for an eight-year-old needs room for the eight-year-old to outvote it.

Week 6: Posca Pens + Paint Practice

~4 hours🎯 Build muscle memory on low-stakes surfaces

The artwork goes on with Posca pens: water-based, non-toxic, punchy as hell, and forgiving in the hands of an eight-year-old. Paint behaves differently on raw foam than on paper, though, so we run drills on scraps before we go anywhere near the real board.

Stock the arsenal: a fresh set of broad-tip Posca pens.Ask Daniel about surface prep: how hard do we sand, and do we wipe it down with acetone first?Scavenge the bay for offcuts, scrap foam, or busted blanks to use as our canvas.Run paint drills to get used to the friction of the foam and practice blending colors.Read up on Drew Brophy’s legendary Posca techniques to avoid rookie mistakes.Journal: log the tests, especially the disasters, so we don’t repeat them.

Checkpoint: Can Noah tell a clean Posca line from a messy, bleeding one at a glance?

Note to self: Posca dries fast but stays water-soluble. Skip a proper seal of clear acrylic and the fiberglass resin will smear the artwork into a muddy blur.

Week 7: Tools + Sanding

~4 hours🎯 Get a feel for the steel

The blank is almost here, and we finally get to touch things. Daniel hands us the real tools: power planer, surform, calipers, sanding blocks. Then we wreck scrap foam until we know how much pressure takes off how much material.

Tool orientation: Daniel shows us exactly how to grip the tools, what angle to hold them, and what they’re designed to destroy.Make some dust by sanding scrap foam to feel the drag of different grits.Take it on the chin while Daniel corrects our stance, grip, and sanding speed. Both of us.Skim the Greenlight Surfboard Building Guide to lock in the technical names for the tools we just used.Journal: Noah draws the main tools from memory and writes down what each one is for.

Checkpoint: Hand him a surform and a sanding block. Can he tell Lara which one hogs off foam and which one finishes?

Noah wearing a respirator near the taped surfboard during the painting stage. — Somewhere around the mask and the tape, this stopped being a cute idea and became work.

Week 8: Lock the Design

~3 hours🎯 Finalize the art. No turning back.

Weeks of sketching, and now we commit. Noah picks the winning flame design, and we check it with Daniel to make sure it scales cleanly onto the actual board.

Lay out all the sketches and crown a champion. Noah makes the final call.Run it past Daniel to make sure it respects the curve of the board and won’t get warped near the rails.Draft a 1:1 scale version on butcher paper to make sure the proportions hit right.Run one final, full-color dress rehearsal on a scrap block.Journal: snap a photo of the final, signed design. The die is cast.

Checkpoint: Can he present the final artwork to Lara and explain why he picked those colors?

Week 9: Blank Arrives + First Shaping

~5 hours🎯 The foam is here. Time to make it look like a surfboard.

The wait is over. The blank is on the island and sitting on the racks. The shapers take the heavy cuts, and Noah and I jump in wherever they’ll trust us.

Arrive early, listen to the master plan, and follow Daniel’s lead.Help lay down the template outline and watch the power planer chew off the crust.Get Noah onto whatever rough sanding the guys will let him do.Journal: record the sheer panic and thrill of making that first irreversible cut.

Checkpoint: Can he point to exactly where we took foam off today and explain why the board is starting to look “skinny”?

Noah in a dust mask in the shaping bay, with a board and foam dust behind him. — The first permanent marks are the useful kind of scary. You can’t Command-Z a surfboard.

~5 hours🎯 Trusting our hands to find the perfect symmetry

Most of what gets romanticised as “shaping” is sanding. Slow, careful, exhausting sanding. It’s the part that turns a crude chunk of foam into something that slides through water, and this week we obsess over symmetry and foil.

Attack the rough shape with the surform and sanding screens to establish the core profile.Work up the grits: start at 80, graduate to 120, and finesse it with 220 until it’s buttery smooth.Trust our hands: eyes closed, palms down both rails at once, feeling for bumps. Then double-check with calipers.Earn the final nod of approval from Daniel before we’re allowed to touch the paint.Journal: get macro shots of the foam texture changing as we move up through the sandpaper grits.

Checkpoint: Can he slide his hands down both rails blindfolded and tell if they feel identical?

Reminder to self: The planer gets you in the neighborhood. The sandpaper buys the house.

Week 11: Paint the Flames

~5 hours🎯 Noah’s moment of truth

This one is all Noah. We’ve prepped the surface and run the drills. Now he paints the real board.

Prep the surface one last time: fine grit, dust blown off, acetone wipe down.Lightly ghost in the flame outlines with a soft pencil directly onto the foam.Lay down the ink. Noah drives the Posca pens. I’m a steady hand if needed, nothing more.Lock it in with a light mist of clear acrylic spray so the finished artwork survives the resin stage.Journal: capture photos of him mid-flow. Have him write down how nervous (or pumped) he felt.

Checkpoint: The look on his face when he steps back from his own work.

Reminder to self: Do not fix the eight-year-old out of it.

Week 12: Glass, Seal, Surf

~3 hours + first surf🎯 Encapsulate it in glass. Take it to the ocean.

Back to the pros. Daniel’s team glasses the board and turns our fragile foam sculpture into something watertight that can take a wave. Then we wax it up and paddle out.

Watch the glassing: fiberglass cloth and catalyzed resin curing over our work.Stick around for the fin-box routing and the final sanding of the gloss coat.The payoff: our very first session on our own board. 🌊Journal: make sense of the last three months. Print a photobook, edit a short video, or just sit back and look at what we did.Noah picks the hero photo for the cover.

The finished Sunset Duckies board before its first session in the water. — The plan was only the scaffolding. The real test was whether this thing would paddle, turn, and come back with salt on it.

Documenting

This runs alongside everything else, every week, whether we feel like it or not.

Capture 1 defining photo + 1 short video clip per session.Noah acts as art director and picks his favorite photo of the week.I write a short recap of what changed.Noah adds a physical entry to his sketchbook (drawing or writing).Shoot close-ups of whatever specific detail we focused on that week.

For the sketchbook part, I put together a printable journal: one page per week, Noah’s turn and my turn side by side, plus a blank box for drawings. Download it as PDF or open it in the browser.

That’s the blueprint, and I’ll keep updating this log as the dust starts flying.

Noah hasn’t fully clocked the journaling part yet. He just wants to shape a board and cover it in hot-rod flames. For now, that’s enough.

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