BURGER WITH THE LOT


The man who developed Firewire boards goes out on his own to let the creative juices flow

BERT BURGER'S SURFBOARD BUILDING CAREER HAS GONE full circle. From an underground, experimental fringe dweller in WA, Bert has seen his ideas plucked from relative obscurity and marketed under the Firewire label, with huge financial backing and a massive factory complex in Thailand. His boards have been stuck under the feet of world title contender Taj Burrow, who surfed his Firewire to victory at Bells Beach earlier this year.

But the big business, mass market surfboard operation proved a difficult fit for the creative dynamo and Burger and Firewire recently parted ways. The Firewire juggernaut is rolling on regardless, but Bert is back almost where he began in a small factory shed behind a suburban fish and chip shop, tinkering around with new materials, shapes and construction methods. He's moved his operation from WA to the Gold Coast to learn the "business" of selling surfboards and be closer to the industry.

But the nondescript industrial shed gives little hnt of the wild inventiveness going on inside.Bert describes his new set-up as "hi-tech soul," using cutting edge technology and materials but fashioning them into hand-crafted boards to suit individual needs. "We want to make the Ferrari of surfboards," he says.

The key ingredient of his boards is still what Firewire calls the "parabolic stringer," but what Bert prefers to call simply "wooden rails" or "rail stringers". His current boards are an intriguing mix of hi-tech and old-fashioned craftsmanship. Polystyrene cores are designed on computer and shaped by machine and then laminated with a sandwich construction and glassed with epoxy

resin. Balsa rails, prefabricated timber skins and wooden rail blocks give the boards an old school finish.

Other models feature innovative digital graphics printed on to a woven silk, and a unique "floating stringer," a flat strip of balsa that sits in a hollowed out recess in the foam blank that can move up and down the board as it's ridden, altering its flex properties. "We've replaced the stringer with springer," he declares.

The springer will feature in all his "booster" series and, he claims gives greater spring for aerial surfers. In this way, he hopes to produce a range of boards suited to all individual needs.

Bert will initially be developing a range of 17 models as well as a full custom service. Boards will retail for around $1000 but, he says, will be lighter, stronger, more responsive and exhibit better flex properties than standard boards. To back his claims he shows me his own latest shortboard. At 108 kg and at 6'4", Bert rides a 6'8" swallow-tail, 21 and 1/2" wide. Incredibly it is only 1 and 7/8" thick on the rails and, with a concave deck, only 1 and 1/2" thick in the middle. "Crew say that's impossible, but with these materials you can do it," he says. He then lays the board on ground and jumps up and down to prove its strength. Its greatest attribute, he says, is its "return," the speed withwhich it springs back to its original form. It is this flex and return that gives the board its slingshot effect through turns.

"It's like riding a surfboard with thought control, it's reacting as quickly as you're reacting," he says. --Tim Baker