New Shirts coming soon

We have been working on a bunch of new shirt designs and our new Two Crows store. Most of the designs come straight off the wall in the glassing room or from random doodles on stuff laying around the shop. A pretty good way to kill some time when the resin is going off. -n

Here is the Two Crows health care plan shirt. It's pretty much all we got when it comes to medical expenses. 

Here is the "surf board builders die younger" screen. This idea was inspired while I was working as a surf guide in the Maldives chain smoking ciggaretts all day. I liked the warning on the front of the pack and thought I could put a bit of a 2 crows twist. Originally it was just photoshoped from a photo, then I decided to Doodle it to give it a more organic feel. As organic as smokes can be.

The Bonzer getting its fins put on. Check the concave on that thing, cant wait to try it!

A little side note to the blog post below by Carl. He was tripping when I started to do the color work. Carl has now learned how to be comfortable out of his comfort zone ( a freestyle philosophy). It was pretty funny watching the bead of sweat on his forehead when I started adding color to his nice clear board. Luckily he let me do my thing, otherwise who knows where we would be now a few years later. Viva La Freestyle!-n

First Board

 This is the first Two Crows board that Welzie and I did together. Believe it or not, it even had the crow logos on the bottom, even though we hadn't even thought of actually making any more than this one board. I figured I'd share a few other pics I randomly have from the building of this first board.

 I was actually just visiting Welzie in Hawaii and it happened that all I had brought were semi guns and the waves were flat. He convinced me that we could build a log in a couple days so that I could get some waves. I ended up shaping the board in a tiny little shaping room up by Sunset. I love that this picture, the first one ever taken of a Two Crows being shaped- you can see a Coors can in the background. Awesome.

 This is a pic of me riding down the Kam in the back of Welzies truck at night, holding onto the shaped blank to keep it from blowing out of the back! That was a pretty sketchy ride, from Sunset to the Sugar Mill

 We glassed the board in the legendary Charlie Walkers shop. Charlie's one of the nicest guys I've met in the mill- but you gotta know him. At this point he hardly even looked at me. Welzie had been working with him for years though. The board was supposed to be glassed clear. Little did I know at this point that "clear" wasn't actually a word in Welzies vocabulary at this point.

Here's a shot of the board getting prepped for hotcoat. These are all the pictures I have of the first board and the experience. We hadn't even considered the idea of working together until after this board was made. Freestyle! -Carl

A few from the Archives

Digging around on my computer tonight I found a few good pics that I thought I'd add to the timeline...

Probably one of the best from the best from the fish batch, hanging up at a show in Berkeley

 Betty, I love you

Bettys dash 

 Everyone sends us pictures of 2 crows, here's one from this summer :) That's a chip  bag that I "modified" into a non-glass beer container... freestyle 

 Sweet little mini owned by Kaitlin Maguire who ranked #1 for ASP North America Womens Longboard in 2011... Not bad at all :) That's the wall at Malibu if you're guessing 

 Dunno what happened to crooked leash loops, they were all Welzie talked about this summer. :) 

Savors Score

After a long day of heading into the concrete jungle, dropping new boards off at Surf Garage and picking up materials, I headed to Savors. Good idea. I needed some new cloths as I hate doing laundry and everything I own gets covered in resin. To my suprize I found an old Bever tail wetsuit in the racks. Its a bit thick and stiff, I probably wont wear it but stoked to know there are still some cool finds out there.

I know it's not that big a deal for most big surfboard companys but for two crows getting a drum of resin and a drum of acetone is pretty awesome. Here the stage gets taken over by the biggest purchase two crows has made in a while. Comming up :)

The Bever tail I scored at Savers. Only 14 bucks how could I pass up.

Cam's board getting its hot coat, should be shipping out to Maui in the next few days. This board is basically a neck beard model Dane Reynolds rides. Way cooler with the Crows and Stripes. 

The wall just keeps growing by the board. You can see the colors in the boards match the colors on the wall.

New Boards and more

This board is from 2 years ago. it sat under my friends house while I went on a walk about and finally got done. It was made for me to use at jockos, but it just got sidetracked for a while. Cant wait to wax it up...unless someone wants to buy :)

The mural has started, ill keep posting pics as it grows

More and more art is filling the walls, starting to look like the two crows art gallery

girls love the crows

a yard stick for surf garage 

a new stock mini simmions

Coozies

Our screen printer Cody suprized us with with some coozies to keep our beer cold and this awesome mouse pad so stoked! Keeping those Rocky Mountins super cold. Here is another pic of Toots I just found, pretty sick shot.

New Freestyle Lam Room

Here is a video of the changover to the new Freestyle glassing room. The previous guy left the place a total mess but we got it sorted out pretty fast. The best part is the wall space for a new mural and even better is the stage. We built it for the resin drums, but after a few beers we realised it's a perfect stage. With so many characters going through the shop we thought it would be funny to record them and their stories in a somewhat more formal setting. we will se how it goes. -n

Laying the ground work

The shop is looking good. New tar paper, rearranged racks. There is so much room and rack space. It's like the Cadilac of lam rooms. Well everything seems bigger than my last zone which had 1 lam rack and 5 wall racks. Now we got 12 wall racks and 5 lam racks. Upgrade. More wall space too. I finally got a place to hang some resin art, and the big wall will be coverd in resin in no time. Should be ready to work on boards tonight or tomorrow morning.

The sanding room before the clean.

Swept up and ready to lay down the tar paper.

Its always good to lay down some carpet or padding under the paper. When you spend enough time on your feet, the concrete doesn't do the joints any favors.

tar paper down. I couldn't help but start tagging the walls. The Logo is on an old coffe table, it will look a little more 3d when the mural goes up.

This is my favorite part. My color mixing station. Nice and big with plenty of room for pigments and cups. PLus a stool so I dont have to sit on the floor like before.

New Year and New Room

A pretty trippy new year... Our friends held a new years eve dance party across from Off The Wall. Too much fun. After a full day of recovery we started clearing out the new glassing room. No easy task. The previous glasser left the place a mess. No worries though, between Steve (Third Stone) and I we have broken our share of resin floors in our day. Cody our screen printer upstairs just moved into another room too, so were having a "room off" who can come up with a cooler looking work space. Im sure Ill win :) we will keep you posted. -n

The before picture of the room. As you can see there is a lot of resin on the floor. Luckily we had some beer in the fridge to keep us going.

Gerald's new board. I am so stoked on how this one turned out. He wanted a Smoke tint (the hardest color to do) but it just looked to plain for a two crows. I threw some stripes on there to liven it up a bit. I love it.

steve looking at the aftermath. Looks like we will be spending this weeks beer money on dump runs.

Weighing in on Noseriders

When I came across this great picture of Waylon Olsen at Malibu it got me thinking about the affect of a riders weight in relation to what he or she chooses to ride size wise when it comes to noseriders. Often riders are unwilling or unable to experiment with major alterations when it comes to surfboards. Nodding to whatever is in their friends quivers or what they've always ridden puts them in a loop of dependance that doesn't always result in the most optimal board for an individual.
     When Waylon first started surfing in the competive longboard collaltion contest scene he was riding what many of the day would have considered the norm for someone of his size. 10' x 19" x 22 1/2" x 14.75" x 3 1/8" give or take a few 1/8's of an inch here or there. Surfing in heats against guys weighing 150 lbs was frustrating. At 220 lbs, it was far from an even battle, we just didn't realize it at the time.
     Sitting on the beach with Waylon at Malibu watching the Jr. Men surf their heats, surfing on basically the same size boards as Waylon, subtracting perhaps 6" in length got us thinking. Watching those kids perform led us to consider the simple idea of putting Waylon on something more equivelant to what they were riding sizewise. A simple ratio of weight vs. board size told us 220 lb Waylon should be riding a 16.5' long by 40" wide board if he wanted to be equal to a 120 lb kid on a 9'x 22" wide board of the same thickness. Unbelievable.  Suddenly we were scrambling to make the widest possible thing we could come up with. "Cheater" was the word CJ Nelson once used to describe Waylons board. Not stopping to consider the huge weight and general size difference between himself and Waylon would lead to that thought.
     Have you ever seen a little kid stand up on a longboard and just balance on it? Ever stop to think about why you can't do the same thing on the same board? In this static enviroment you can begin considering height and weight in relation to stability. Removing the wave from the equation helps one zero-in on simple design principles with more focus.
     First of all, the simple reason you probably cannot float on the board is because it is not buoyant enough to support your weight. This is key to considering how large of a board is required to float a full size adult. Buoyancy is a simple equation based on the mass of an object and its density. Standup paddle boards come to mind. They're huge... giant. When considering the scaling effect of weight vs. boyancy you can start to see a clearer picture of how much it should be considered. Remember, a gallon of water weighs 8 lbs, and a 5 gallon jug weighs 40. So a person weighing  190 lbs is carrying that 5 gallon jug of water with them vs. a person weighing 150 lbs. It makes a little more sense how the effect of even a little extra weight can be pretty dramatic.
     Moving forward in this hypothetical situation and suddenly you can float on the surface of the water.  You find yourself teetering to the left and to the right, trying to maintain your balance, while our grommet friend is simply standing there. This brings in another thing to consider: stabililty. It's relative to the width of your board and because your center of gravity not only is heavier, it's higher up. The width of your base isn't enough to keep you errect. Think about what happens with your chrismas tree every year. Too narrow of a base and you're having an argument with the wife about why it almost topples over ever time she puts another glass globe on a branch. So the simple solution is to put a wider (larger diameter) base under the tree. Once again we find ourselfs at the extreme, SUPs at 28"-32" wide. Even the most amateur of surfers can balance on them.
     We consider the widths that Waylon rides. 25 1/2", sometimes 26". They don't seem so extreme when we consider the kid balancing happily on his board in the lineup. The volume of his boards still revolves around 3" because thickening them results in a lack of sensitivity that he hates. But after seeing him surf a SUP as a normal board durning a session this summer, I'm beginning to question even that. <(") Carl