On scanning instead of measuring

We installed a structured-light scan rig in the back of the bay in summer 2024. The original idea was simple: scan every board before it ships, in case the buyer wants a copy years later. What we ended up doing with the rig is more interesting.

Measuring a hand-shaped surfboard with calipers and a rocker stick is precise enough to remember the shape, but it loses everything that lives in between the measurements. The way a particular rail rolls into a particular tail block. The asymmetric flex of a stringer that wasn't quite centered. The gentle hip Jeff put in a one-off egg without writing it down.

The scan rig keeps all of that. We get a mesh accurate to about 0.2mm across the whole board. That mesh becomes the source file for any future reproduction in the McCallum CNC tier. It also becomes a record of what the board was, in a way that survives the foam being lost or broken.

§What we don't reproduce

Some boards get scanned and then never touched again. The customer wanted a one-off, the bay agreed it should be a one-off, and the scan exists only as an archive. We do not replicate those without the original buyer's permission, even years later, even to ourselves. Some shapes are meant to belong to one person.

The configurator on this site is built on top of a small set of scans — six of them, the ones the bay agreed should belong to everyone. You are looking at one of those right now if you have it open in another tab.