Surfboard Shaping Robot: From Alaia to ABB Arms

A surfboard shaping robot sounds odd, because shaping is the part of surfing that people still describe as a craft. Yet most modern boards start as a pre-formed foam blank, and many shapers already use computer programs and cutting machines to speed up the work. At least one company, kinaroad, has gone further and put an industrial robot arm in the shaping room. This post follows the job from Hawaiian wooden boards to foam, then to the machines and robots of today, and asks where ABB robots such as the IRB 6700 and the GoFa cobot could fit next.

Brightly colored modern surfboards in a rack on Oahu. Photo: Chelsey Horne / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How shapers worked from alaia to foam blanks

Before foam, boards were wood. The alaia was a thin, finless board ridden by Hawaiians who were not of royal descent, and the longer olo was kept for royalty. A photograph taken around 1898 by Frank Davey shows Charles Kauha on the beach at Waikiki, carrying one of the last alaia. Modern replicas can be as thin as 2 cm, or about three quarters of an inch. Every board was cut and finished by hand, so every board was a one off.

Charles Kauha carries an alaia board at Waikiki, photographed by Frank Davey around 1898. Photo: Frank Davey via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1926 Tom Blake built the first hollow board after he acquired an ancient olo, and by 1930 the hollow board had become the first mass produced surfboard. Builders fixed a central stringer and cross ribs, then covered the frame with a skin. A hollow wood board can weigh far more than a modern foam and resin board. Hobie Alter began shaping balsa boards in his family's garage in Laguna Beach in 1950, and in 1958 he made a polyurethane foam board, which began the foam era.

Five men with their upright surfboards at Manly Beach, New South Wales, in 1938. Photo: Ray Leighton / Australian National Maritime Museum via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions)

Foam turned shaping into a supply chain. Clark Foam, founded in 1961, grew into a near monopoly supplier of blanks to shapers and shops. It closed on December 5, 2005, without warning, and Scott Bass, an Encinitas surfing figure, later organized the first Boardroom show in response to the chaos that followed. A separate route to the same trade began in 2010, when Paul Winton, an engineer with a PhD in mechanical engineering, founded kinaroad in Auckland. He had bought into a small windsurfing company in the mid 2000s and wanted to build boards locally with less labor.

Vintage surfboards on display in the Cocoa Beach Surf Museum in Florida. Photo: Leonard J. DeFrancisci / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Surfboard shaping robots and ABB arms today

The Boardroom show is still running. The Coast News reported on September 30, 2026 that it celebrates surfboard craft at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, almost two decades after Bass started it. One essay in The Inertia on hand shaping against CNC machines argues that the machine is just another tool and that finishing, refining and glassing still hold most of the work. In practice the machine does the repeatable cutting, and a person finishes the board and decides how it should feel.

A hand checks the outline of a white handmade surfboard in Angoulins, France. Photo: Sweet Ice Cream Photography / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The best documented robot shaper is kinaroad's. On February 11, 2016, Australian Manufacturing reported its first overseas deployment, at a factory on the Gold Coast in Queensland. The article said the factory could shape more than 2,000 boards in 2016, with capacity for up to 7,000. kinaroad installed the system at no cost and charged a fee per board. Chief executive Scott Fenton said the software and robot removed the need for manual fine shaping and fin box routing. A 2016 issue of an ABB customer magazine carries a feature called Surfboard shaping that names the IRB 6640 as a key tool in the system.

An ABB robot works on a long wooden part clamped in a fixture, with dust hoses overhead. Photo: ABB

That magazine feature is the only ABB link to surfboards in the sources used here, so what follows is a possibility. The IRB 6700 is a heavy robot that ABB's partner Teqram uses in its EasyGrinder cell, where the arm picks steel parts from pallets, grinds them and stacks them again. A surfboard rail is far softer than steel, but the job has the same shape: hold a tool against a curved surface at a steady pressure. Programs like this are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio before anyone touches a real blank.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

Where robot shaping of surfboards goes next

Smaller shops are the likelier customers for the next generation, and the GoFa cobot suits them. ABB's OmniVance sanding cell puts a GoFa CRB 15000 with a Mirka sander in a ready made package for wood panels, and a board needs the same kind of surface work after shaping. A cobot like this can work near people, and SafeMove can monitor its speed and working zones when someone steps close. The woodworking sanding post covers that cell in more detail. The open question is cost, because a cell has to pay for itself on the volume of a single shop.

A GoFa cobot sands a curved wooden panel with a Mirka sander inside ABB's OmniVance finishing cell. Photo: ABB

Programming is the second obstacle. Every board is a different shape, so every board needs its own tool path, and a robot cannot ask the shaper what they meant. kinaroad's answer was a design tool that works with the robot so that a designer can order a batch of one. In an ABB cell, RobotStudio would let a shop simulate the path of a new outline against the rails and the fixture before cutting any foam. More about that style of work is in ABB robot use cases.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

For homes, the effect would be indirect. A surfer would order a board to a file, and the shop would cut and finish it. Wave pools such as Lost Shore near Edinburgh give surfers the same wave every time, which could make a tuned board easier to judge, though no source I found links the two. The harder problems are foam dust, resin fumes, the cost of a cell and the skill of finishing by hand. Those keep a shaper in the room, with the robot doing the repeatable cuts.

Visitors watch the wave pool at Lost Shore Surf Resort in Ratho near Edinburgh, March 2025. Photo: Gordon Brown / geograph.org.uk (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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