We feel especially proud of how many people we’ve successfully helped to build their own surfboard, exposing people to new (or old with a twist) and better ways. Our class season is ramping up and we can’t wait to meet all of you that travel here to join us. We feel so lucky to have this growing family around us.

We’re also thankful to all of you that helped with our Kickstarter project. Because of your generosity, we’re looking forward to spending some time on the road this summer, bringing our classes and our boards to you. We started the year off with a memorable class at the Surfing Heritage Foundation in San Clemente and we’re looking forward to getting back out west this summer and fall to continue our mobile classroom project. Keep an eye on our schedule, our San Francisco classes (that’s right, two of them back to back) are already almost full and we hope to add more up and down the west coast in places like San Clemente, Ventura, and the Northwest.

We’ll see you on the road!

We had been sitting around the dinner table with friends one night, and the idea of moving hit us pretty hard. Within three days, we had found a house to rent, I had given my notice, and we had a moving date scheduled. Today, we still live in that house where, in the basement, the early days of Grain were born. But that might be the only thing that’s remained the same.

In those early days, Grain grew from the driveway to the garage to the basement, then to a small shop in a barn where we filled our first orders for custom boards and kits. We grew from a one person operation to – at times – more than ten people, all working in a 4,500 square-foot shop building boards, milling wood, packing kits, making skateboards, teaching classes, helping customers, taking photos and more. And I couldn’t be more proud of all of the people that contributed over the years to make this place great.

Here’s a look back at some of the highlights of the last eight years. Hope you enjoy it as much as we have. And thanks for being there with us.

Glassing in the basement was always a treat. We had to hang plastic sheets to keep the dust from dropping onto the wet boards every time someone walked overhead.

We also built, shaped and sanded boards in the same space. Not ideal.

Our friend Ben visited us in our basement and built two fishes. This shape that he created went on to become our Waka. We like to think of Ben’s visit as the thing that inspired us to go on to teach hundreds if not thousands of others to build their own boards.

Board number one on the dock in York Harbor. We embraced the boat building tradition by over building it and fastening it together entirely with bronze screws and deck sealant.

Our friend Ty wood burned our first sign which still hangs above the door of our current shop. Our first shop, pictured here, was just one room where we did everything from talking on the phone to milling wood to glassing boards. Hot in the summer and cold in the winter, snow would often blow under the front door and pile up inside.

Within 6 months, that small shop was packed with four of us working on boards and kits. We knew it wasn’t long before we had to move.

Our first fish and Nick’s first honest-to-goodness product photo shoot in our shop.

Brad and I became partners right after I got out of the basement. He brought tools and expertise that have proved invaluable.

The “Pug”, bought as is, where is. We paid $900 to a bunch of roadside gypsies for it. We couldn’t even drive it for months because the back axle was held in place just by gravity. But after years of service, and a handful of breakdowns, we have no regrets.

Our current shop on the farm. This space was cavernous when we first checked it out, but we quickly built it out to suit our needs.

What it looks like now on any given day.

Our first 7 day class photo, what an experience.

Nick shows up every once in a while and orders us to take all the boards we have outside for a photo. It can be a bit disruptive, but we’re always thankful to have captured the moment.

North Shore down time. Dave Rastovich puts some finishing touches on the mini gun we designed with him.

Designing new boards is a passion of ours. This is our 12′ gun, designed for a big guy surfing big waves.

A few of us have gotten slightly obsessed with paipos over the last couple years. This batch was packed and shipped to our distributor in Japan.

A Pig amongst pigs (talking about the board, not Johnny). Keep an eye out, we’re looking forward to adding this new shape to our lineup soon.

All of the sudden, April is here and we’re finding ourselves running around putting the finishing touches on a few custom boards, prepping for another busy class season, putting together rewards for our Kickstarter backers, and more. With all this going on, and since we haven’t done a good old fashioned photo blog in a while, here is some of what we’re up to around the shop.

Spring time in New England, this is a common site.

Introducing, the Pig. We’re kicking around some names, but feel free to send us your thoughts.

One of the features of a Pig is the fin. Big, beefy and right on the tail.

The changing of seasons is a welcome sight along the seacoast.

Green grass and high tides

This is what we think of when we hear the word branding.

The Cider Hill and it’s big brother the XL Cider Hill. Keep an eye on our site, we’ll be offering this one soon.

Hot coats and gloss coats.

The Cutwater is quickly the go-to longboard of our demo fleet.

This is why.

Experimenting with a little color before glass. This one’s heading to Oregon, we know someone’s going to be pretty excited.

Our March class, mid stream.

A mini-gun getting its final coats before heading to Greece.

Check out Fix the Shadows below from our friends at Insight and make sure to watch it till the end. You might just see Craig Anderson surfing a Waka.

We left the Maine winter behind in February, and headed to Southern California to bring the experience of “building your own” to another group of surfers. The SHF was a totally unique place to hold a class… with the history of surfing surrounding us – Tom Blake kookboxes to modern guns and everything in between – a walk through the museum is a journey through the evolution of surfboard design.

Much of the history of surfboards is wooden.

With all the legendary wooden boards lining the walls around them, six Californian students crafted an assortment of paipos, fishes, retro single fins, and longboards. Pretty soon, we had covered the floor with cedar shavings!

Our students, hard at work making piles of shavings.

Right beside our shaping stands was a replica of Dale Velzy’s original shaping shack at Malibu. On display in a glass case, were the tools he used to shape wooden boards back in the day. It was funny to all of us that our students were using the very same tools that were made to look so antiquated behind glass. Bet Dale knew how to sharpen a spokeshave…

Spokeshaves, blockplanes, drawknives…our tool bench looked strikingly similar.

Nathan G., our good friend and San Clemente local, built the 6’5″ Seed this time around (his third Grain build). And though the four-day blitz schedule didn’t leave much free time, a few of us managed a quick morning surf at San-O where Nathan was lucky enough to paddle out on our 6’5″ Seed demo and test out the same design he was building! We noticed an extra skip in his step for the rest of the class.

Another of our students was Jen Smith, who has won more than a couple of world longboard titles. She’s been shaping for a while now and wanted to try her hand at a hollow wooden board. She built our beloved 4’5″ Leaf, a classic Hawaiian paipo shape.

Pro surfer Jen Smith and her handcrafted paipo.

Scott F. had been dreaming of taking a class for years. Funny that he grew up just an hour from our shop in Maine, but it took us coming all the way to California to make it possible for him to attend the class where he built a beautiful classic Root. With classic New England hospitality, he saved me from having to sleep outside on a picnic table with his offer to share his tent one night.

We also had some Hollywood fame in the class. Casey, a stuntman and aspiring actor, had to miss some of the action to run off and audition for comedy shows. Tim and his son Aidan are the third and fourth generation in their family to be stuntmen, and though they signed up right before the class started, they quickly became two of our most stoked students. One of the best quotes of the week from Aidan: “This is the most craftsman-like I’ve ever felt.” .

When he wasn’t auditioning for “New Girl”, Casey was building a 9′ Root.

3rd and 4th Generation Stuntmen Tim & Aidan built the 6’4″ Wherry and 5’8″ Biscuit.

Tim sent us a message after the class, sharing how psyched he still felt: “What a great experience. There is nothing more connective to a surfer than that experience you all gave us, that of building your own board…Thanks again to you, Mike, Allen, Andy and Vince and of course all the student board builders. What a bunch of good dudes. You are a hell of a craftsman and you helped us all to be that, to build the best product we possibly could”.

At the end of 4 days, six beautiful student-built wooden surfboards were born, soon to make their way into the Pacific…

Class photo: new wooden boards amongst the old.

Big thanks:
To Barry at The Surfing Heritage Foundation for having us (and hopefully for having us back)
To Allen for trusting us to use his vehicles to schlep the class stuff around,
To Tracy for letting us take over her courtyard to prepare all the boards,
To Caleb at Paragon Cabinet West for use of his woodshop,
To Andy Purmont and Vince Kemp for helping out with the class,

Help us get our own West Coast truck and trailer and maybe this will be the last class that we have pull up to in a borrowed truck towing a Uhaul trailer. Visit our Kickstarter project here and give a little love so we can keep passing it on to great people like these students.

And we’ve been totally gratified that it’s given us ready access to the pure awesomeness of all of you, and that we have so many new ways to share what’s going on with us. So, that’s all good. But then… there’s “crowd-sourcing”.

If ever there was an amazing idea, this is it. At a time when we (again) feel betrayed by the financial giants that seem to be the drunken helmsmen of our society, here come zillions of regular Joes and Janes discovering cool projects through a site called “Kickstarter”, and funding them with small (and not-so-small) micro-investment capital. A few of us around here have been backers for a few things – which is always fun, and gives us the warm fuzzies at the thought that we’re helping people with something they’re passionate about.

So we thought “what the hell – we’ve got a huge idea we’ve been dreaming of but just don’t have the cake to get going on our own- let’s crowd-source it”. You can read all about it here (hint: it’s not regime change). Support it if you’d like, we’d love your backing, but do us a huge favor and definitely pass the word via your social media (sigh) of choice. In a nutshell, it’s phase-next of our drive to get out to see more of you and share more boards and good times and board-building tech – there’s a new video at the top of our Kickstarter page that tells all about it.

If you’ve never backed something, you should try it – even if it’s someone else’s project – it really is fun, there’s always cool rewards for your help, and you don’t pay a dime unless the project meets it’s goal. See you online.

We’ll be drawing one winner’s name on Friday March 1st, which is coming right up, so if you were planning to take a chance, now’s the time. You wouldn’t think it, but every $50 donated to aid the victims of Sandy is $50 they still badly need. You can do something important toward helping people re-build their lives – plus, fifty bucks for a hand-painted, one-of-a-kind Pandan? Fahgettaboudit.

Click here to purchase a ticket and thanks for helping those that need it so badly.

Whether you’re after a unique statement about your concern for the environment, want a long-wearing, comfortable garment, or just like the logo, this may be your last chance for these particular designs. And to make it ever sweeter, we’re offering a special 40%-off sale on them for a limited time. Get them at our Portsmouth store or online, but act quick cause this stuff is slipping away. Limited sizes and styles, so what you see is what we got.

We’ve been pretty excited around the shop as we come closer to the day that we’ll be taking our road-show over to the UK. It’ll be the farthest afield that we’ve brought a Grain board-building class yet, and though it’s a helluva long way to go, we’re sure it’ll be worth it.

We had some challenges as we morphed a class normally held in the comfort of our own shop to a roaming operation. Chief among them was how to provide the same quality of experience people have gotten year after year in Maine, even though we may be in someone else’s neighborhood. The half-dozen travel classes we’ve done around the US have given us a chance to really dial it all in. Plus – lucky for us – in Great Britain we have the guys at Fyne Boat Kits. They’ll be making all the shaping stands, rocker tables, and framesets right there at their shop in the English Lake District where the class is to be held. Since they’ve been supplying our European customers with Grain HomeGrown Kits for almost a year now, we can be sure that everything will be first rate and just as if we did it ourselves. They’ll also be sourcing local woods for the boards which has always been a high priority for us.

Check the Fyne site soon, but get registered early – if the class isn’t full by the end of February, we may not be able to have it… We gotta get tickets soon! It’s coming fast – April 21 to 27, so if you’re thinking about it, do it!

For any colonials who’d consider making the hop across the pond for this unique experience, let us know – we’ll send you our flight info… if we get on the same trans-Atlantic, the first beverage service is on us!

But all that really masks what goes on behind the scenes… where we’re intensely driven by good and thoughtful design. We use cutting-edge CAD technologies and sustainable design criteria that’s prototyped and discussed Grain-wide until we’re satisfied. If our hand-planes embody a simple organic beauty, it isn’t because they just grew on trees… it’s because we worked hard to make them that way.

Case in point is the new “strapped” version of our hand-planes. Not willing to employ the standard, too-tight, non-recyclable plastic-leash-cup attachments found on many hand-planes, we thinked and thinked until we came up with a simple brass staple we could embed directly in the wood itself. It mounts just proud of the top surface of the hand-plane in a generously sized oblong “cup” carved directly into the wood. The design leaves plenty of room to get the strap in and out and it uses almost no material.

The straps themselves were a typical group-design effort with everyone chipping in ideas until we landed on an awesome bicycle-innertube strap, with strategically stitched wetsuit material and velcro – almost all of it re-purposed material otherwise headed for the landfill. The result feeds through the brass staples, velcro’s back on itself and is wrapped with the integrated neoprene flap that provides a super-comfortable, adjustable fit. It firmly grips the hand – mitts or no – with the perfect resistive flex to keep your hand tight to the deck without any discomfort.

So to all of you that’ve told us you prefer straps to hand-holds… this one’s for you. Different strokes for different stokes.

We kicked off the year with a Board Blitz with the Off The Wall design team from Vans in early February.

Later in February, Al and Kyle braved the cold in our first 7-day class of the year.

At the beginning of March, we went west for our first class in Portland, Oregon. We used locally sourced Western Red cedar and enjoyed a week of great weather in Portland. Thanks to Vin for letting us set-up shop in the Instrument headquarters.

We returned to Maine for our March Class, where unseasonable weather continued for Mike, Topher, and Chuck. We were shaping outside in t-shirts…in March…in Maine!

Two good friends and two couples filled up our April Board Blitz.

We had a really fun crew and mix of boards for our May Class.

Cameron chose to make his own surfboard for his high school senior project. He built a 9′ Root in our May class and then stayed another week to glass it.

We had quite the class in June! Our then intern Ascher built a Steamer, Outside TV filmed for a short video they made about us, and I broke my nose during a lunchbreak surf.

In the beginning of July, we had three fathers and sons build three boards in three days! Stanton, Nate, and John became the youngest Grain students at 12 years old.

Our July Class students came from near and far. Near being our hometown York and coastal New Hampshire. Far being Virginia, Costa Rica, and Tobago!

One half of our August Board Blitz was Team Fitzgerald. Eden’s brother and father helped her build an 8′ Steamer.

Team Kamm from our August Board Blitz. Joel and Lucia built a 6’2″ CI Biscuit.

Later in August we had a class with seven people, including an Australian and two Brazilians, as well as Beckley and Steve, our first Jordan Project Scholarship winners!

Jon Wegener co-taught our paipo class in September, kicking off our Surf Re-Evolution weekend.

The guys from Entropy Resins stayed after Surf Re-Evolution to build a couple boards of their own.

T.J., Jimmy, and Grant built a 6’5″ Seed, 9′ Root, and a 5’10″ Waka later in September.

In the beginning of October we built boards at the Korduroy.TV headquarters in Encinitas, California.

Veteran student Bob built a 4’5″ Leaf with an intricate plank design.

Scott won a class spot at the 3S Artspace fundraiser at Grain in August. He came back in October with a buddy and built himself a 10′ Waterlog.

Michael and Jack made some logs in our last board building class of 2012.

In our last class of the year, Jack glassed the 10′ Waterlog he built in our November class and Ryan glassed the 8′ Steamer he built from a HomeGrown Kit.

We’re looking forward to all of this year’s classes! See you in Maine, California, or the UK!