With Ash Lawton praising the surfboard Chops Lascelles shaped for him, we couldn’t resist introducing you to the artist himself. Chops has been shaping boards since the 1960s, he currently shapes with Beachbeat Surfboard factory and to say that his is a familiar name in the European surf world is a bit of an understatement. So, who better to ask about the slightly offbeat craft of shaping?

Chops shaping a board in a Plain Lazy t shirt.

How do you shape a board?

Chops starts off with customer information, which he puts into a pretty cool technology, CAD (Computer Aided Design) programs and shaping machine. The machine cuts the blank, the very basic shape, from lightweight, durable foam planks. “My job is to translate what information you have given me into a creditable design that works and makes you catch loads of waves and have loads of fun. If it doesn’t do that, then technically I haven’t done my job properly, or you’ve given me the wrong information,” he says.

The rest of the shaping is done by hand, producing boards named for what they do, like “performer nose rider” and “cutting edge thruster”. So what does the technology actually do for the surf? Chops says: “Well, one thing it does give is a great consistency to the design. You start with a basic design and keep tweaking it, but you’ve always got the master design to go back to, you know.

“You will get a better board for sure. If you don’t get it right the first time, you will eventually, because it’s the degrees of adjustment that you can make on the master [design].”

Design goes a step further – introducing the Platypus

Chops has got a new range out, launched in May 2009, called Platypus born from snowboard-inspired designs he did a few years ago with a young Cornish local called Grant Strover. “It sort of went to bed for a while, but we resurrected it… But Grant’s sort of moved on to doing something in Europe somewhere. I saw another design that was similar to ours and thought, ‘Well, this looks like it’s going to an acceptable thing,’ so I introduced the designs as the Platypus range.”

The Platypus boards have had their critics but have withstood the ultimate test: the surf. Chops says: “The Duck Bill [the largest board in the range] is the most exciting long board I’ve ridden in quite a few years.

“It’s not what you’d call a classic or traditional stall trim board where you turn off the tail, move to the nose, move to the middle of the board, trim, come back and forth and run to the nose and whatever. On this you stand in one section and you turn it. You turn it as hard as you like. So its release off the top of the wave is really different. There’s no rail resistance in the middle of the board because of the side cuts – it’s gone. So, you’re turning off a shorter rail area on a longer board.”

“I had this real hollow ride. I had the best surf and I came out smiling and I haven’t stopped smiling about it since.”

But there was a time when Chops didn’t know the board so well. “I struggle with it for the first half dozen surfs. But that was also because I hadn’t been surging in the winter – I’d been away for a few months, working on a project in Costa Rica. So I got back, and you know, it was a full winter surf in a winter suit and boots and I struggled a bit with it to start with.

“The initial [board], what I call Long Bill, was a little bit narrow to start with in the winter, so that’s when I came up with the bigger, wider-nosed Duck Bill version. When I made that, I just jumped on and took off. Now I can ride either one, I jump in between them, no problem. But it was funny – one day at Chapel Porth, it just all came right. I had this real hollow ride. I had the best surf and I came out smiling and I haven’t stopped smiling about it since.”

Ash surfing at Perranporth

Laurence Jarrett-Kerr