Do you want to blow blanks???
I was the principal supplier of the PU foam system and the designer of the moulds and manufacturing plant to King Mac Foam in Mexico.
The materials we use are of premium quality and sourced worldwide to achieve the best result and all the components in the foam system come together in our quest to have the notable quality which have obviously been achieved.
The supply of our foam system will be complemented with any and all technical advice to achieve the best result, ‘a packaged deal’.
In the last 50 years that I have been formulating foam and blowing blanks the only people that can and will survive in the supply of foam system is the manufacturer who formulates the foam itself. A lot of attempts have been made from system only suppliers and subsequently failed because of not being able to blow their own blanks in their own moulds.
My foam has been designed for easy use and complemented by shapers. Refer attached links which may allow you some insight to my distinction.
https://www.oceanartwork.com/news/graham-king-foam-master/
https://www.theleader.com.au/story/5529179/end-of-an-era-for-graham-king-surfboards/
If you would like to know more please contact us,
Graham King +61 417153636
Sharon King +61 416128483
Interesting post, and appreciate the sincerity and historical value.
Good foam is good foam, no matter where it comes from. What I have found from many years of shaping - first board was a freebie demolished Greg Noll my brother brought home that his friend gave him to give to me after flying off his car. It had been a beautiful 10'2". A couple of feet of nose was broken off, 50 to 60 dings in it, and the skeg ripped off. That was my first shaping job in 1959.
I was eight.
What I've seen through all the changes is a diminishing choice of truly consistent easy to handshape blanks. Now, more than ever, most blank manufacturers seem to have dedicated their blank lines to machining.
If you're a skilled handshaper, shaping these blobs of foam are a boring, labor intensive, time consuming experience. Your planer can't cut deep enough to get to where you wanna be before your life expires.
Even some of the blanks designed by a collaboration of well known shapers seem to indicate they should stick with shaping and forego designing blanks.
The good blank designers deserve praise because they save career shapers a lot of time & wasted energy for the population of experienced shapers that are still handshaping custom orders. These same shapers may possibly be shaping "one offs" that prove popular enough that a file be made on them to offer as models.
Some of those names are well known; Yater, Barnfield, Arakawa, Rusty, Parrish, Hinds, Pavel, Jones, Biolos, Patterson among others. These are good, stateside shapers that know what the hell they're doing when offering up a blank that another experienced shaper can appreciate.
At the end of the day, good blank design, as well as good foam is the core of the matter if you care about what you make.
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It’s just been a chafe in the wind process for surfboard foam here in the U.S. I had a high appreciation of what was attempted in Ensenada by King-Mac. I was interested in the foam, but different issues came up and interest diminished. A well known So. Calif shaper shaped the Plugs and then complained that the foam was too hard for hand shaping(as I recall). The Surfblanks attempt struggled as well. U.S. Blanks was slow and methodical, but didn’t have the problems that start ups like Echo-Tech and Just Foam had. Eventually what we had was three very good Poly companies and two or three good EPS foam manufacturers. All is well.
That which can be assorted without evidence was read in an illegal magazine.
Rereading this old thread and thinking about the few King-Mac blanks that I saw on Maui back then. There was a dealer on the Island who stocked King-Mac blanks. A few were shaped and glassed up at Pauwela Cannery. Yes they were harder as per most Australian formulas are. The problem that occurred was that after glassing they turned brownish yellow up and dow the stringer. No one was sure why. But some theorized it was a glue up issue.
That which can be assorted without evidence was read in an illegal magazine.