Surfing World – by Andrew Kidman

In 2007 Western Australian Bert Burger won Surfing Magazines ‘Shaper of the Year’.

Bert has spent much of his shaping life experimenting with foam/wood/epoxy sandwich construction techniques. Last year he moved his operations to Thailand where he set up a factory to produce his Sunova Surfboards. Andrew Kidman spoke with him during a recent visit to Australia’s east coast.

For you it's about getting the customer the exact board that is right for them.

Well that's the sales model I want to run so I've been reluctant to try and get the boards into a lot of shops. You might have a lot of people selling your boards but are they selling the right board to the right person. Ultimately everybody's got their own unique styles and tastes and things they like in a board. So if you're dealing directly with the customer you're going to be able to point them in the right direction.

Do you find that traveling is a really good way to learn about your equipment?

I think a guy like Kelly Slater surfing so many boards, in so many different waves, really learns a lot. I really think surfers and shapers that travel are the guys that really get to pick up a lot about how different waves demand different equipment. I've gone to locations where I've rolled up with whole quivers and I've just gone home with my tail between my legs. I didn't make it out of one barrel, and I've had to go back the next year with another quiver. After a couple of years you start to work out what works. There are a lot of extreme waves around the world that are almost like one board waves.

I have about forty different boards, all for different waves.

And there are still holes in your quiver aren’t there?

Yeah.

Over the years guys have come to me and said ‘I want an all rounder’. Essentially if you get an all rounder you get a board that goes 'okay' in everything but doesn't ‘go off’ in anything. That's where the quiver comes into it. It can get infinite, I've had 13 or 14 board quivers and I don't know which ones to pack in the van so I put 10 in and I get down to the beach and think, "God, I wish I had that other one with me."

If you've got the board that is perfect for the conditions you just have a ball, you don't have bad surfs.

It's like shoes. You have running shoes, mountain climbing shoes, tennis shoes and they all have a different application and each of those shoes needs to be available in everybody's size, and it's like that with surfboards for us.

The equipment you make uses some pretty interesting flex combinations, and you don't have a stringer in the middle of the board, can you explain what it is and how it works.

I took the stringer out of the boards when they got too stiff. I was just chasing performance, I took the stringer out and they got too floppy like a thong. That one bit of wood down the middle of the board stiffens the whole board up. When something bends you have shear motion, the top and bottom slide past each other, so if you’re not connecting the deck to the bottom via the stringer basically you're going to give yourself a bigger range of flex.

The wood is the key. It's like when you get a wooden ruler and a plastic ruler and you can bend them both and the plastic ruler will bend but it doesn’t have much guts in its spring back, but the wooden ruler will spring back with a bit of kick. That is where the spring back in the flex is really critical.

That's interesting because I was asking Sage Joske about his wooden Alaia his father shaped him and he said, 'the wood just has this feeling, like it's alive'

I'll let you in on a little secret… the wood is the magic. It's as simple as that. If you take your stringer out of a normal board you've got a floppy piece of crap, they are dead, the stringer is the thing that brings the board alive. The stringer is what gives your board the kick back, it helps stiffen the board but it also helps it spring back out of turns.

That's why if you put your stringer in the rail then it's engaged, it's in contact with the water, and you get your spring back from the rail line. Your rail line is engaged in the water so it's almost like you've got something to push off. There's a certain range of body movements, like how quick can you jump? How quick can you spring out of a turn? When you spring the wood it just seems to work with the way we work as humans.

Does putting things like fibreglass on the wood effect it?

To be honest the more stuff you put in there that's not wood the more you deaden it. So that's why I try to put as much wood in my boards as I can comfortable put in there and still make a long term durable surfboard.

What's going on with the wood because I can see you've got it in the rail and you're using it on the bottom?

The woods a thin sandwich, basically the bottom of our boards are designed to flex or morph. This might be an extreme example but think of it like a surf mat. Those things fly on chop, essentially the chop does not transfer through the mat, it's got air in there and literally the chop gets absorbed by the flexible bottom as it ripples across the water. The persons’ body mass can just can continue to move uninterrupted without the other forces bumping into them. So what we have in our boards is a hard deck that transfers your body weight and your energy down to the rails. The rails are solid so the board can flex, and the bottom has a cushioned feel to it, so when you're flogging down the line hitting chops and bumps it absorbs the bumps because there's a little bit of give in the bottom with the soft poly styrene core. The board bends and twists, the bottom can kind of do it's own thing - go with the wave. The tail really flexes off nicely so you can really bend it into bowls. You can bend into it an inch of tail rocker so you can really fit it into a tight spot, but then it's flat on the flats when it's open and you're not loading it. All the spring is in the perimeter of the board.

How do you customise boards for people using flex.

Well it's weight. It goes back to the traditional thing of weight, height and where do you want to surf it. Like if a guy is surfing Margaret River and he's big, he's going to put a lot more load into a bottom turn than a little guy surfing in Florida.

How does it help the average guy.

I don't think you start feeling it until you become a competent surfer. You can't take advantage of flex until you at least have the ability to generate your own speed on a surfboard.

This is where the materials are so important, because materials can bend, but if you hold them there for too long they don't actually spring back to their original positions. But with something like timber, trees just stand around in the wind all day, they blow one way and they blow the other, at the end of the day they’re standing back up there again. They've got the memory, and they can hold that for a long time. Timber just has a really unique structure that it can bend and spring back that many times and it still feels alive.

The magic is the wood and the more crap you put around the wood the more you kill the ride. To hear that comment about the Alaia just makes me feel good.