I recently picked up my brand spanking new gun from Sam Wildt of Carver Surfboards. Oh boy is it ever so pretty. The photos on here do it no justice. It really looks good, but the best part about it is that it has a SoCal WaveRiders logo glassed in there! 
Sam Wildt is the shaper and owner of Carver Surfboards. He shaped his first surfboard as a grom at 14 years old and has been living the life ever since. He’s shaped for other brands and is now branching off into his own label, Carver Surfboards. I got to hand it to him… He was pretty smart when creating his website. The way he did it was pretty cost effective. He registered a domain name, http://carversurf.com, and redirected that to a MySpace page. Now he has free hosting.
Sam is a cool, knowledgeable guy. He seems pretty laid back and everything he told me he would do… he did. The communication with him during this whole process was very good. I’ve gotten a lot of custom boards from various shapers that I haven’t even talked to. With Sam, I was able to give him some rough dimensions and talk about what I wanted to the board for. Then he came back at me with changes and the rest is history. He also kept me updated on the status of the board. Something no one has ever done before. I usually have to run down to the surf shop only to find out my board is not done and I can try checking back in a couple days. I know a lot of you out there feel my pain.
Sam gets his blanks from Homeblown. Homeblown is a foam company that has two types of blanks, both of which are earth conscious. They seem to be on the "green" trend too (which is not a bad thing). The first blank they call Biofoam. 50 percent of all materials used in this blank are from agricultural ingredients. Their 2nd blank uses MDI (methylene di-phenyl di-isocyanate) instead of the traditional TDI (toluene di-isocyanate). In short, this means that it’s healthier for the environment and people, and it’s lighter and stronger. The cells in this foam are a lot smaller than others. Even with the cell size, they boast increases in the power to weight ratio (10% lighter and 15-25% stronger). More can be read on their website http://www.homeblownus.com/index.html. After the blank is shaped, Sam gets them glassed over at Tiger G. They’re a pretty big glassing company that laminates boards from all different shapers and labels. Good quality glassing and from what I hear… some good people too. I’ve had no problems with them or their product thus far.
Now, with that out of the way, I can move on to the good stuff. The board I got is a gun. I mainly wanted it for the few days out of the year that SD gets big. This last winter we had two days that I was able to surf La Jolla Cove. Both of which I found myself just bouncing down the face of the waves with my longboard. So this board is to eliminate some of that bouncing and to give a little more control. The dimensions are as follows.
Length: 7’8”
Thickness: 2 ¾
Width: 19 ¾
Nose: 11 ¼
Tail: 11 ¼
I had originally wanted an 8’8” but the only gun blank they had was a 7’10”. I’m down for trying new things so I’ll a go a little shorter this time. Plus, a smaller board will help me get under some of the bombers that come in and break on my head. Sam added a little more nose to help with paddling power. I’m used to a lot of paddling power surfing mostly longboards so I’ll take what I can get. It has a slight single to double concave on the bottom with futures slots. It even came with some Vector II foils. I dont know how I feel about those yet.
The glassing looks good except for couple spots. Before I go any further I just want to let you know that I’m being very critical with this. None of these minor flaws should affect the ride of the board. On the tail there’s a small area on the rail where you can see where they cut the cloth. There is also a small indent on the bottom towards the tail. But, like I said earlier, these are very minor and should not have any influence on the ride.
Overall this board buying experience was one of the better ones I’ve had. Sam’s a cool guy and it didn’t take very long. About 5 weeks total. The majority of it was waiting for it to be glassed. 5 weeks isn't that long. I’ve waited up to 13 weeks to get a board before. Actually, twice I waited 13+ weeks. Anyway, I can’t wait to take this board in the water. After that, I’ll come back with part 2 of this review. In the mean time... here are some pics.
