Camel's 10' 0" Just shaped it for him while i was recently in WA. It designed to be a quad but he rode it as a thruster during the last swell big swell in WA and paddled into a couple of bumpy 20 footers at Cow Bombie and Marg's.

Why Surfboards are Such Amazing Value and Cheaper than Coffee
Surfboards are incredible value and owning 3 or 4 surf boards costs less per day than a single cup of coffee.  When you factor in how much enjoyment can be experienced from a surfboard, this is incredible value. Especially when you consider that a cup of coffee is going to last all of 15 minutes, while a surfboard can be surfed for 6 - 8 hours a day. Even when a surfboard is not being surfed, a reasonable board continues to be a piece of fine craftsmanship and art to be admired as it stands in the corner of your room.

Just say for example, you bought a major production label board and payed $750 for it. You keep it for a year, look after it and sell it for say $400. The cost to own that board is $350 a year. Less than a dollar a day! For the same price of one cup of coffee a day you can own a quiver of 3 boards. If you drink 2 cups of coffee a day, for the same price you could have a quiver of 6 boards that you changed over every 12 months!

Let’s say you bought a top line 7’4” gun from me. The full deal - polish, tinted resin, glassed to last. It’s going to cost you $1725. This is not just a high performance machine, it’s also a fine piece of art that a whole team of very experienced craftsman have put many hours of skill and knowledge to create. Most of my customer keep their guns for many years. Take the example that you kept the board for 3 years and then sold it cheap for $500. The board has cost $1225 over the 5 years. It works out at just under $1.12 a day! For the same price as a cup of coffee you could own three of these and change them all over every 3 years.

Many customers keep my boards for 5, 10 or 15 years. If you kept the above board for 10 years and gave it away for $200, it would have cost you a total of $1525. In this scenario this comes in at just under 42 cents a day. It’s less than 1/7th of the cost of a cup of coffee…..

I have been making surfboards for a long time. A massive amount of time and energy goes into ensuring that my boards surf well. I don’t make many boards and my current R and D costs are more than $300 a board. At the end of the day, even with my new prices and assuming I still mange to sell a 100 boards a year, I’m only going make around $200 a board or $20K a year. Twenty grand a year doesn’t go very far and there are many of us who have been doing it for such a long time now and really wondering why do we keep bothering…..

The answer is simple….. we love surfing and are passionate are about creating surfboards to maximise the pure incredible experience that surfing is. My advice is to take advantage of us while you can, because many of us are waking up to the fact that apart from the satisfaction of knowing that someone's’ loving the surfboard we just made them, there’s bugger all in it for us and we’d be better off doing something else.

Surfboards are incredibly cheap and amazing value. Even if they were twice the current prices they would still be amazing value and I don’t see how anyone could possibly say otherwise.

October 2009 Price Rise and New Glassing Options
The new prices and glassing options for the boards are now posted on the site.

Research & Development Costs & Surfboard Prices
I’ve been looking at my R and D costs over the last couple of years. My R and D is what keeps my designs developing and performing at the levels they do. Without it, my designs would stagnate and would have never reached their current levels of performance.

Researching and testing surfboards, especially boards for bigger and more powerful waves is not a cheap exercise. It involves dragging bags of surfboards through airports and onto planes and then out to often remote locations to put in the time to wait for sufficient swell to be able to test each design.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t enjoy testing the boards….it’s often the most enjoyable part of making boards, especially when a new design performs well. But at the same time it is a real cost of producing my boards and needs to be factored into the cost of building them.

Because I make so few boards, less than a hundred a year, my per board R and D cost is really high and currently running at about $300 a board and with some models, like the MKIII twin keel fish series have about $30,000 worth of R & D invested into them!

When I factor this into my business I’m actually losing about $10,000 a year to make surfboards Hence the new prices which are actually now designed around making a nominal profit. However, with my current numbers it really is only a tiny profit that doesn’t even come anywhere close to being an income and so at this stage I’m not exactly sure what the long term future of Jim Banks Surfboards is at this point.

But one things for sure, they're not going to get any cheaper!

The New Hi Glass Ratio Series - 3 Times the Strength!   Available from Oct 1st 2009
The hi glass ratio laminations are new laminations specially designed to greatly improve the tensile and compression strength of the board in a way that doesn’t compromise, but actually enhances, the flexibility and ‘spring’ of the board. No surfboard is impossible to break, but these boards are highly resistant to breaking with an overall tensile and compression strength that is approximately 3 times that of a standard glass job.

The standard hi glass ratio lamination perfectly matches the top and bottom of the board for tensile and compression strength. With the standard hi glass ration lamination the bottom of the board has double the glass fibre content of a standard lightweight lamination and features key reinforcing strips to give the board an overall tensile and compression strength that is approximately triple that of a standard glass job! The deluxe version features a deck lamination glass ration with 50% more glass fibre content than a standard lightweight lamination and creates a deck that is even stronger than the legendary Glassed to Last laminations.

The Hi Glass Ratio lamination is the best option for a maximum performance durability ...especially for serious waves!

Note: This does not refer to the type of compression where a board is dented. The compression strength I’m referring to here is the type of compression where the board is compressed longitudinally resulting in failure and collapse of the glass fibres. All surfboard breakages are longitudinal compression failures.

Introducing the new Classic Series - Glassed to Last!
The Classic Series laminations feature the legendary “Glassed to Last” glassing technique. These laminations were designed to withstand the extreme punishings that my boards often undertook while out exploring the remote regions of the South Pacific, Indo, and Australia's north west desert during the 80’s and early 90’s. These were places where a broken board could not be replaced or repaired, as it often took a great deal of time and effort to access these remote locations. It was absolutely essential to keep the boards in one piece during these trips and so the “Glassed to Last” 6oz bottom and double 6oz deck was the glass job of choice. I actually don’t recall ever snapping a “Glassed to Last” board.