Today I’d like to tell you how the Woodkit.pro project began.

The year was 2017, and I was teaching my first surfboard-building workshop in Europe, specifically in Ericeira, Portugal.

Around the same time, there was a wooden surfboard gathering happening in Spain, and that’s where I met Guillermo, who was working with a company dedicated to Paulownia reforestation in Europe.

Paulownia, also known as Kiri, is the wood I have always used to build my boards. In fact, there’s even a post about it here on the Blog.

From the very beginning, Guillermo and I had an idea: to make the process of building a wooden surfboard easier by creating kits containing all the wood needed for the project. That way, there would be no need to search for different suppliers and source everything separately. Everything would come from one place. It would also eliminate the need to manually cut the entire framework of the board.

Over the following years, I held other workshops in Nazaré, but the idea was eventually put on hold. At the time, all of my time was dedicated to workshops, traveling, and shaping, so we never took the project any further.

That changed when Javier, who worked alongside Guillermo, called me one day and suggested that we bring the Woodkit project back to life.

From that point on, Woodkit.pro finally became a reality.

I live in Florianópolis, while Javier and Guillermo are based in Spain. So each of us took care of a different part of the project: I provide my surfboard models and designs, Guillermo takes care of sourcing the wood, and Javier handles the operation that brings these two things together and turns them into a complete kit, ready for someone else to build.

It’s important to point out that today’s kit is not the same one we imagined back in 2017. It is the result of years of testing and development.

Each kit is a complete project for one specific surfboard model and size. The kits are based on the different models I have developed over the years as a shaper.

All of them have been tested in the water by both professional and amateur surfers. Many of them were students who started the workshops with no previous experience working with wood, and left with a perfectly shaped board.

Inside the box, you’ll find all the wood needed to build the surfboard.

I emphasize this because one of the things I hear most often from my students is how difficult it can be to gather all the wood needed for a project. Woodkit.pro is a great solution to that problem.

Basically, what we did was make the whole process more practical by putting everything needed to build a high-performance wooden surfboard into one box.

You can find Woodkit.pro at woodkit.pro. It’s incredibly rewarding to see how that idea from 2017 has evolved into something so practical, while still staying true to the craft and art of working with wood.

Thank you very much for reading this far!

All the best,

David Weber.