On Sydney's northern beaches, amidst some of surfing's biggest legends, an Australian shaper/board designer is quietly but determinedly making history of his own. For more than 25 years, Dee Why local John Gillis has been involved in the surfing and sailboarding industries and is now bringing big changes to both with the touch of his keyboard.

John's shaping life began when he made his first surfboard in his backyard at the age of only 14. A few years later, in 1983, he went to Japan for the first time, where he learned about shaping accuracy first hand. "I spent 6 months there that first time, shaping for Crystal [surfboard manufacturer in Tokyo]. The Japanese shaper was really meticulous about measurements. He gave me a few pointers and then I just started doing numbers and the more I did the cleaner they became. I knew what I wanted in a board as far as curves so once I had the technique to get those curves...I began shaping professionally".

When he returned to Australia, windsurfing was just starting to take itself seriously and John, true to his love of surfing and yacht racing, started windsurfing and then shaping waveboards. "My friends were into wavesailing so the first board I tried was a waveboard, but of course waveboards were at the time just big surfboards that you could put a rig on.". For a surfer who'd built his own boats, including an eight-metre composite yacht, windsurfing "was like surfing and sailing together and that was perfect for everything I'd been doing up to that point".

Soon he was rubbing shoulders with world class competitors, due to the happy coincidence that his local sailing spot in Sydney, Long Reef, was hosting the Sony Contest. Today the walls of John's shaping bay, still located in Dee Why, read like a Who's Who of sailboarding, with signatures and comments scrawled by sailors such as Josh Angulo, Mark Pedersen, Melanie Braund, Luke Hargreaves, Peter Cabrinha, Alan Cadiz, Bruce Wylie and, perhaps most significantly, Phil McGain.

It was McGain who, in 1988, saw John's reputation reaching beyond Australia's shores and invited John to be his personal board builder in Maui. For the next four years John spent large chunks of time in Maui making over 50 boards a year (mostly slalom and course racing boards) for McGain, then ranked No. 4 on the world pro sailboarding circuit. "It was four years of intense 'get it right'. Phil was in the Top 4 on the World Cup and at the cutting edge of design. You didn't just shape a board that looked like a board and say 'go and compete on this'. It was down to the millimetre, hundreds of hours testing on the water and collecting data. Had I not worked for Phil, I don't think the accuracy and quality of my boards would've been where it is now.

To meet McGain's need for perfection and his need to make fine adjustments to his boards, John started using computer software in his board design . But whilst McGain's system (a mathematical system containing spreadsheets of numbers) was effective at the time, it really only served to fuel John's imagination for what was possible. In 1993 John teamed up with Ian Pearce, a British surfer/sailboarder with a doctorate in materials engineering who had created a computer program to design surfboards.

The "complex curve drawing package" as Ian describes it, called the DAT (Deadly Accurate Template) Designer, was originally designed to simply provide a full-size template detailing what the customer wants a kind of road map for the shaper to follow instead of relying on the way the shaper feels on the day or any other variables that may enter the process. Since then it's developed into a sophisticated program that allows for a whole range of data-handling capabilities. Following is a sample screen - showing a board in 3D and the dimensions used to create it:

The software is currently available in two versions. The professional version which is already being used by a few Australian and Hawaiian shapers is priced out of the reach of most surfers, at around $2000. It's intended for use by major shaping operations all over the world. But Ian anticipated how the software would capture the imagination of the average surfer wanting to design his own boards on his own PC and developed a Pro Lite version that retails for around $110. The difference between them is that the Pro Lite version will only print scaled-down templates and won't do some of the manipulations that the pro version does. Still, with the Pro Lite version you could quite easily play around with various designs, save the one you want on a floppy disc and send the disc to your favourite shaper who, with the aid of the CET shaping machine can turn your design into reality.

The shaping machine John is currently developing is the piece de resistance of the whole project, bringing the abilities of the DAT Designer software to the real world. Shaping machines have been used before of course, but what makes John's unique is that it doesn't need an original board to copy. Its movements work straight off the computer, which means that apart from being able to see and modify each board before you make it, the set-up costs are lower and one-off boards can be made more efficiently. Plus, ultimately, it will allow shapers all over the world to communicate more easily. "Because you can store a board's statistics on a computer file, you can email these files to anyone anywhere in the world. Boards can go around the world through a telephone line.

So how exactly does John's shaping machine work? "I design the board with the dimensions the customer may want or what I think will work for somebody it's a top view, a side view and an end view and then I can view the board in 3D to see it from different angles and analyse the curves on the screen. When I'm happy with the volume, surface area and the curves, I put it on a floppy disc, I put the disc into the [shaping] machine and it calculates all the moves for the motor to carve out the board from the block of foam." Add to this the shaper's sense of craftsmanship honed by years of making boards and the possibility of making the perfect board, just the way you wanted it, becomes a reality.

There are currently three CET machines producing DAT Designed shapes: in Sydney, Perth and Maui. The shapers using the DAT software include Chris Goulding (GStyle), Shane and Luke Stedman (Spyder Surfboards), Steve Clements (Steve Clements Designs), Chad Asser (Black Flys), Mick Button (Rusty) in WA, and Lloyd Ishimine (Hawaiian Energy) and Quatro Sailboards in Maui.

As for the future...John is building a new improved machine but its $100,000 price tag puts it out of reach of all but the more successful and/or large-scale shaping operations. Still, its potential advantages for any board manufacturer are infinite, the bottom line being that it will allow them to put less time into cutting the board's basic shape so they can focus on refining each board for its rider; that is spend less time shaping and designing and more time testing and refining. And Ian is working on a new version of the software called DAT 2000, to be released sometime in 2000. Stay tuned to this site for updates on developments in computer shaping...

To get a board designed using DAT software, contact any of the following shapers: Chris Goulding (GStyle), Shane and Luke Stedman (Spyder Surfboards), Steve Clements (Steve Clements Designs), Chad Asser (Black Flys), Mick Button (Rusty) in WA, or Lloyd Ishimine (Hawaiian Energy) or Quatro Sailboards in Maui.

For more info on the CET shaping machine, contact John Gillis in Sydney, Australia.
Office: 61-2-9981 1896 - Factory: 61-2-9939 9800
Email: htsurf@ozemail.com.au

For info on the DAT Designer software, including professional and Pro Lite versions, contact Ian Pearce in Swansea, Wales.
Phone: 44-1792-419511 - Fax: 44-1792-360 147
Email: IanPearce@datdesigner.com
Website: http://www.datdesigner.com

Louise Southerden can be contacted via email at : lousouth@hotmail.com