From 5'7 to 6'9 — The Art of Scaling a Custom Surfboard

This 6'9 custom started in a slightly different way.

The customer had seen a short video I'd posted of a much smaller 5'7 and really liked the look of the board — the outline, the diamond tail and just the overall look of it.

He basically wanted that idea, a twin fin with the flyers into a diamond tail , but in a 6'9 with plenty of foam for easy summer surfing.

Sounds simple enough. Just make it bigger.

But scaling a surfboard from 5'7 to 6'9 isn't quite that straightforward.

If you simply enlarge everything proportionally, you're probably going to end up with a completely different board. The rail line gets longer, the curves change, the wide points shift and suddenly you've got a lot more surface area and volume to deal with.

So the starting point wasn't really, "How do I make the 5'7 into a 6'9?"

It was more about working out what he liked about the original board, then translating those characteristics into something that suited him and the type of surfing he wanted to do.

Making It His Board

Because I've made boards for this customer before, I already had a pretty good idea of what he likes .

One thing was the rails.

He prefers a slightly lower, more refined rail rather than something overly full, so even though we were building a 6'9 x 21 x 3 at around 46 litres, I dropped some thickness out of the rails.

That became an important part of disguising the overall volume. There's plenty of foam through the centre of the board for paddle power and glide, but you don't necessarily want to feel all 46 litres when you put the board onto a rail.

I also changed the nose template from the smaller 5'7 that originally inspired the board.

One of his favourite boards is my Alien model, so I pulled a little of that DNA into this one, adjusting the nose outline to have more of the Alien look and feel. It made much more sense than simply stretching the original template out another 14 inches.

The overall foil needed some thought too.

At 3 inches thick through the middle, there's obviously a fair amount of foam to work with. I kept the overall foil a touch fuller to maintain the whole reason for building this board in the first place — easy paddling, early entry, glide and effortless summer speed — while refining that volume towards the rails so the board didn't become overly chunky.

That's really where custom shaping gets interesting.

The starting point might have been a 5'7 he saw in a short video, but the finished 6'9 became a combination of that original idea, elements from another board he already knows and loves, and what I've learnt about the way he likes his boards to feel.

It carries the DNA of the little 5'7 that originally caught his eye, but it's definitely not just the same board made bigger.

Same inspiration. Different board. Built for the surfer.

The colour /artwork is resin tint in blue on the bottom with clean cut laps deck .