Clark Foam’s demise, 10 years later (2015)
surfer.com
surfer.com
A surfboard is made from a foam core, with a stiff polyurethane coated fiberglass wrapped around the foam. This is what makes surfboards lightweight but fairly strong. To make a surfboard, you first shape the foam by cutting and sanding it into the desired shape (shaping). Then you lay several layers of fiberglass cloth over the shaped foam and pour the resin over the cloth (glassing).
It's something of a craft -- the quality of shapers and glassers varies a lot. And there is no scientific "best" shape for a board, so it's completely up to the shaper to make a board that works. Nowadays many boards are CNC shaped, then finished off by hand, rather than being entirely hand-shaped.
Clark Foam manufactured the foam core, a.k.a. the "blank," which is a pre-cut piece of stiff foam that is shaped down into the final board.
https://www.firewiresurfboards.com/pages/helium-tech their timbertek is popular too
https://darkartssurf.com/ won the "stab in the dark" contest
https://lostsurfboards.net/lib-tech/ not a traditional stringer
For me longitudinal formers are a great idea and add loads of stiffness and strength fore and aft.
I remember my dad getting a phone call in the middle of the night from the owner 20+ years ago : " X, you've always been a great customer of mine, if you want or need anything I have at the shop then you're free to come get it tonight."
We got in the car and got sheet after sheet of urethane foams, we were using it for aerospace and bicycle stuff at the time, as well as some small hand tools and miscellaneous stuff that he offered us.
The facility was chained and barred that next morning
A week later the entire facility burned down
A month later people from the EPA started contacting the owners' business partners and larger contracts; turns out that after the fire there was some extensive soil testing, and the owner and anyone involved was nowhere to be found to be asked to pay for the extensive environment rehabilitation to deal with (among other things, i'm sure) the huge chemical spill.
We never heard from the owner again. I don't know whether or not the fire was an accident , but even as a kid I just presumed it was a failed fraudulent cover-up attempt or insurance grab; but I guess we'll never properly know.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if Clark Foams shut down as a preventative measure to avoid a huge EPA hassle for the owner; making foam is a nasty business, and it's expensive to do it by-the-book.
No, it's cheap to do it not-by-the-book, and that lets people undercut innovators and those doing things legally and/or in an environmentally sound way.
Clark was engaging in dumping to fight off anyone who dared to try to compete with him or innovate. I don't know if he was able to do so because he was cutting environmental corners, but he sure does seem like the type to not have a problem doing it.
Edit: yup, from another article, he shut down because he didn't want to comply with environmental, fire and emissions regulations. Big surprise.
And now that there isn't a massive asshole strangle-holding the entire industry? Wouldn't you know it, innovation has blossomed, including a slew of far more environmentally friendly manufacturing methods:
> Even better, experimentation was finally unfettered. In the years since Clark’s closure, a kaleidoscope of weird foams have been developed. Reclaimed foams, mushrooms, algae, and even agricultural feed stock refuse are finding their way into the blank manufacturer’s recipe book. Nothing is off the table. Blanks can be made in far less toxic a manner, and that last for far longer than anything Clark ever produced.
Board shops in SoCal were already selling mass-produced surfboards in 2005 using cheap mass-produced (non-Clark) foam blanks. I learned to surf on one of those boards.
Clark's customers (mom-and-pop board shops) asked him to make improvements to his blanks and his process so they could compete with the mass-produced boards and he refused. He started losing business to cheaper, better competitors and decided to just break all his toys and go off into the woods instead of changing how he did things.
This caused a relatively small disruption to the supply of surfboards, because cheap mass-produced boards were already available in many stores and high-end boards never used his foam to begin with. This really just affected the middle-tier mom-and-pop shops that had based their supply chain around his foams. Luckily for them, the market for boards is highly seasonal (even in SoCal), so they were able to find replacement blanks by the time the 2006 surf season began.
Looks like Clark is doing ok!
But it really seems he did quit because of a protracted dispute with local fire and air quality district personnel that was escalated to the EPA. The threat of massive fines was looming bigger and bigger, and the letter he writes just exudes desperation that he didn't feel he could reach compliance.
No, this man was just petulant that after decades of not following employment/environmental/fire regulations, he was finally being held to them...and his answer was to burn everything to the ground out of petulance.
Dude, if I sell contaminated goods to person B, person B can sign a release that they won't sue me... but they can't promise that person C or government D won't.
Even if they indemnify me, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm off the hook.
If he was happy to drop his prices to dump his product to force out competitors, than he should have been happy to accept the additional costs of complying with workplace, fire safety, and environmental regulations everyone else has to comply with. Oh wait...he wasn'.
Or he could have raised his prices. But then, he would have actually had to compete on product quality, and it's clear the only thing he really had going for him was that shapers were used to his product and it was cheap.
Since he's closed up, the market has undergone substantial innovation and improvement, including
Literally nothing stopped him from pursuing partnerships to develop and produce more environmentally friendly products, but that's a lot less fun than simply being yet another whiny, entitled boomer.
I mean exactly what I said, not the words you're cramming in my mouth.
The letter he wrote acknowledges the regulations are important and that the enforcement approach taken by authorities are justified.
It also makes it clear that he has tried to comply, and is concerned that he had no viable path towards compliance, and potential unbounded liability if he got it wrong. And he got scared and bolted.
> but that's a lot less fun than simply being yet another whiny, entitled boomer.
Nice slur. He was actually a member of the silent generation.
It seems like you're really upset about all this, throwing around insults and "petulant" in your comments and leaving multiple incomplete sentences around.
> This was a strangely ill-conceived mic drop. A gigantic, misdirected middle finger to the surf world who’d done nothing but happily line up to purchase Clark Foam’s product.
This appears in the article twice.
I looked at the page source, and yes, that second instance has a CSS style applied to it called "feature-quote". I guess that style is no longer in their stylesheet, so now it just looks like a mistaken repetition rather than a pull quote.
> On a web page they just give you a spoiler.
I don't understand why people want to experience their nonfiction as if it were fiction.
There are other ways to grab your attention than pulling something out of its context and interrupting the flow of an article. I don't know, maybe today's audience is so steeped in reality TV that they like the entire show being previews of the rest of the show. But I personally like articles to flow, and that's not limited to fiction.
The factory was on Crown Valley at Forbes. The site may have become a preschool - but it is all gone now and a giant condo complex is there.
https://www.ocregister.com/2012/09/27/preschool-approved-for...
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.5578181,-117.6767446,3a,75y,...
Tangent but the first commercial tax service opened in 1865, 11 years before the telephone was invented. Lindy's law suggests the fax will outlast email, and surfboards.
And its about something 10 years before that. Original title: "Clark Foam’s Demise, 10 Years Later"
It's kinda interesting, but it was 17 going on 18 years ago.
(submitted title was "The unexpected shutdown of Clark Foams")