Watch: Hayden Cox Shape Live!

Watch a board designed, shaped and glassed in response to Facebook fan comments…

Earlier today, the noted shaper Hayden Cox designed a board entirely from viewer feedback via his and the WSL’s Facebook pages.

Crowdsourced, yes, one of those vulgar crowdfunded things that either don’t happen or they don’t work? No.

I got a little confused on the dates, couldn’t find it on the WSL site (Facebook live event only) and so I missed part one whereupon thousands of WSL fans (averaging 4000 viewers during the event) threw their opinion at Hayden.

I called him just after he’d wrapped (“I was real nervous a couple of hours ago) and he says it wasn’t high-performance shorties the gang was chasing nor fishes. The consensus was for something in between.

Given the outright contractions of surfboard design and the insane number of variables, the board ended up being a five-foot-eight-inch twin-fin with a winged swallow tail, thirty litres in volume, neither high nor low fidelity, not overly wide or thick in the nose, but, then, straighter in the rocker for a fast, stable platform.

Through the nose is a displacement hull or what Hayden calls an “aggressive double concave. It penetrates the water surface and feeds the water through the board. It softens that slapping feeling you get on a flat bottom. Makes it forgiving and smooth. Allows a little more volume up forward, too.”

Hayden is thrilled the world is watching him graft ideas onto foam. “I’m passionate about shaping, I love design, and I love technology. And the really cool thing about surfing is that there are no formal boundaries. In most other sports there are boundaries on equipment: baseball bats, golf clubs, Formula One cars. In surfing, you can ride what you want and it’s up to you to interpret that and surf a wave with excitement.”

Let’s examine!

Tomorrow the board is spat out of the shaping machine and Hayden steps in to clean up the rough spots. The day after we get the laminating process. Is the little twin going to get his patented Futureflex-epoxy combo or something a little more traditional?

Depends on you. Light up the comments.

Tune in here at eight am in Australia, three pm on the West Coast US, real late in England.

And, in case y’asking, a Craig Anderson refined twin-fin is going to become part of the Hayden Shapes lineup later in the year.