On signing a board

There is a small graphite mark, about the size of a thumbnail, hidden under the gloss coat near the tail block of every hand-shaped McCallum. It says JM and a year. It is not decorative. It is a contract.

When a board is shaped from foam to gloss in the bay — meaning Jeff held the planer, Jeff did the rails, Jeff did the spray work — that mark goes on. When the blank was rough-cut on the CNC and finished by hand, the mark gets replaced by a stamp that says STAMPED · COMPUTER-CUT. Same handwriting on the receipt. Different mark on the foam.

We had a long argument about this in 2024. The ghost-shaping side of the bay (we built about thirty-eight ghost-shapes that year, mostly for shops on the East Coast) wanted the same JM mark on every board, on the logic that a McCallum outline is a McCallum outline. The other side — Jeff, mostly — pointed out that a signature isn't a copyright stamp. A signature means the hands were here.

§What the mark says

Hand-shaped boards: graphite signature, year, dimension. Computer-cut boards: stamped foil, the words STAMPED · COMPUTER-CUT, year. Ghost-shaped boards: stenciled MARKED · MCCALLUM OUTLINE. Mexico-made boards: a pressed paper label on the deck, removable, that says LABELLED TIJUANA.

We sometimes get asked to remove the mark on a hand-shape when the buyer wants a clean look. We don't. The mark stays. If you don't want to see it, the answer is to buy a different tier — not to file the signature off a hand-shape and pretend it's something else. That would be exactly the dishonesty the four-tier system is built to prevent.

The receipt always tells the truth. So does the mark.