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Aaberg, Kemp

Abberton, Koby

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academia and surfing

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advertising and surfing

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aerial

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alaia board

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Allen, Chuck

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Alvarez, Pepe

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Anderson, Simon

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Aurness, Rolf

Auster, Ken

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Bain, Rob

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Baker, Grant “Twiggy”

Baker, Tim

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Ballard, Bill

Ballard, Rochelle

balsa

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Banks, Jim

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Barilotti, Steve

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Benson, Becky

Benson, Linda

Bermuda

Bertlemann, Larry

Beschen, Shane

Smooth, porous blond wood, lighter than cork, grown mainly in Central and South America; the most popular core material for surfboards in the 1940s and 1950s.

Surfers initially used balsa in combination with redwood; Pacific Systems Homes, a Los Angeles-based house-building company that dabbled in surfboard construction, built redwood-balsa composite boards as early as the 1930s. All-balsa board became standard in Southern California after World War II, when boardmakers Bob Simmons, Matt Kivlin, and Joe Quigg developed the "Malibu chip," which weighed as little as 25 pounds—40 pounds less than the average redwood plank boards popular just a few years earlier.

By the mid-'50s, suitably light balsa was becoming hard to find. Boardmakers Dave Sweet and Hobie Alter, along with engineering graduate and surfer Grubby Clark, soon began working on the creation of a polyurethane foam substitute. By the end of the decade, foam blanks had all but replaced balsa as the surfboard's core material.

While foam was lighter, less expensive, and endlessly replicable, not everybody was happy with the change. "The stuff just felt wrong," recalls boardmaker and big-wave pioneer Greg Noll. "Foam was gritty and it didn't have a good smell. It had no life to it. It was just . . . available." Original California power surfer Phil Edwards actually preferred the wood boards, which had less flex than foam; he continued to use "Baby," his favorite balsa board, long after most surfers had switched to foam. "We used to have a saying," Edwards said in 1992. "Spastic on plastic, good on wood."

Balsa is still used for a tiny percentage of new boards—mostly high-end longboards—though the quest for a longer-lasting, sustainable surfboard has motivated a few boardmakers to reconsider balsa as a material for performance boards as well. Nearly all balsa-only shortboards are "chambered," or hollowed out. Composite boards made with foam centers and balsa strips along the rails were popularized in the mid 2000s by shaper Bert Burger and Firewire Surfboards. Foam boards can also be "skinned" with a balsa veneer.

Original balsa surfboards have long been valued as both historical artifacts and objects of beauty, and are hot sellers at surfboard auctions. In 2009, a 10'4" Matt Kivlin-shaped balsa sold for $39,000.

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