Shaped by Hand: The Makers, Builders, and Mechanics Behind Riding Culture
The Riding Collective — Research Study 010
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026
Introduction: The Rider Gets the Glory
Every ride begins with something someone else built. The wave rider stands on a shape that took thirty hours of hand work. The skateboarder drops in on a ramp some volunteer poured on weekends. The mountain biker descends a trail that someone cut into the hillside with a Pulaski and a McLeod, by hand, probably in the rain.
We do not talk about these people enough.
Study after study in this series has centered the rider — the rider's history, the rider's terrain, the rider's economic barriers, the rider's emotional cost. That is appropriate. Riders are the culture. But riders ride on things, and those things did not appear from nowhere. They were shaped, welded, cut, glassed, hammered, and poured by people whose names rarely appear in the magazines, whose faces are not on the posters, and whose contribution to riding culture is so foundational that it has become invisible.
This study is about them. The surfboard shapers working alone in dust-filled bays. The bicycle frame builders who turned steel tubing into geometry that changed how humans move across terrain. The trail crews who spend hundreds of hours building something they will ride for five minutes. The ramp builders who gave skateboarding its vertical dimension. The boot makers and saddle makers and ski technicians whose trades are closing around them as manufacturing moves offshore and handwork is replaced by injection molds.
I want to be precise about why this matters to the Collective. Our archive is organized around riders and places and moments. That is the right structure for a cultural record. But a cultural record that documents only the performance and ignores the production is incomplete in a way that distorts the truth. Every great ride is a collaboration between a human body and a human-made object. The object carries the knowledge, the aesthetic judgment, and the physical labor of its maker. When we lose the maker, we do not just lose a product. We lose a way of knowing.
The Collective's expanded research series exists to fill gaps that the foundational studies identified but could not address. This is one of the largest gaps. The makers are aging. Their shops are closing. Their knowledge is embodied — it lives in their hands, not in manuals — and when they stop working, it is gone.
This study will not save that knowledge. But it will insist that the archive acknowledge it, document it, and honor it with the same seriousness we bring to the riders themselves.
Chapter 1: Shapers
The Hands That Give Waves Their Shape
A surfboard shaper works in a closed room coated in polyurethane dust. The blank — a rough foam form — sits on two sawhorses under fluorescent light. The shaper holds a planer or a sanding block. There is no screen, no readout, no undo button. Every pass removes material that cannot be replaced. The board emerges through subtraction, and the shaper's hands carry decades of accumulated knowledge about how water moves, how foam flexes, how a quarter-inch of rail thickness changes the way a board holds a turn.
Al Merrick began shaping in Santa Barbara in the early 1970s. By the 1980s, his Channel Islands Surfboards had become the most influential shaping house in the world, not because Merrick pursued scale but because Tom Curren rode his boards and won everything. The partnership between shaper and rider — Merrick reading Curren's needs, adjusting templates ounce by ounce, building the tools that allowed Curren's surfing to exist — is one of the most important creative collaborations in riding history. It is almost never described that way. Curren is in the Hall of Fame. Merrick made what Curren rode.
Donald Takayama, who died in 2012, shaped an estimated 25,000 boards by hand over a career spanning five decades. His longboards were considered among the finest ever made — not because of exotic materials or proprietary technology, but because Takayama's hands knew things about water flow that no software has yet replicated. When he died, that knowledge died with him. His shapes can be reproduced by machine. His understanding cannot.
The tension between hand-shaping and CNC machining now defines the craft. Computer-controlled cutting machines can reproduce a shape to tolerances no human hand can match. They are faster, cheaper, and more consistent. Most boards sold today are machine-shaped or machine-cut and then hand-finished. The economics are unanswerable. A hand-shaper produces perhaps three boards a day. A CNC machine produces dozens.
What the machine cannot do is respond. A hand-shaper talks to the surfer, watches them ride, adjusts. The relationship between shaper and rider is iterative, conversational, and deeply personal. When that relationship is replaced by a dropdown menu on a website, something is lost that cannot be measured in rocker profile or concave depth.
Skateboard deck manufacturing followed a different path but arrived at a similar place. When Stacy Peralta and George Powell founded Powell-Peralta in 1978, decks were shaped from solid wood or crude laminates. By the mid-1980s, the seven-ply maple construction that still defines the modern skateboard had been standardized, and companies like Powell-Peralta, Santa Cruz, and Vision were producing decks with screen-printed graphics that became cultural artifacts in their own right. Vernon Courtlandt Johnson's graphics for Powell-Peralta — the Ripper, the skull and sword — are among the most recognized images in action sports. The deck was not just a tool. It was a canvas.
Snowboard construction evolved from Sherman Poppen's Snurfer — a bound pair of skis with a rope handle, built in 1965 for his daughter — through Jake Burton Carpenter's garage workshop in Londonderry, Vermont, to the layered composites of modern production. Burton's early boards were laminated hardwood, and the craftsmanship was rough but functional. What mattered was that someone was building them at all. By the early 1990s, snowboard construction had incorporated fiberglass, carbon fiber, Kevlar, and sintered base materials borrowed from alpine skiing. The garage was gone. The factory had arrived. But the riders who shaped the sport's identity — Craig Kelly, Terje Haakonsen — maintained close relationships with the people who built their boards, and those relationships produced the innovations that defined the discipline.
Chapter 2: Welders and Builders
Steel, Titanium, Carbon, and the People Who Chose
In 1974, in a garage in San Anselmo, California, Joe Breeze watched his friend Charlie Kelly descend Mount Tamalpais on a modified 1930s Schwinn Excelsior, and something shifted. Within three years, Breeze had built the first purpose-designed mountain bike frame — the Breezer No. 1 — from chromoly steel tubing, brazed by hand. Tom Ritchey was building frames a mile away. Gary Fisher was assembling bikes from their components. The entire discipline of mountain biking emerged from a cluster of frame builders in Marin County who were making what did not yet exist.
This origin story is well known. What is less discussed is that the craft of frame building — the ability to join steel tubes at precise angles using heat and filler metal, to design geometry that responds to terrain, to build something a human trusts with their body at speed — was the enabling condition. Without the builders, there were no bikes. Without the bikes, there was no sport.
Tom Ritchey went on to found Ritchey Design, which supplied frames and components to the early mountain bike industry. Mike Sinyard founded Specialized in 1974, originally as a component importer, but the Stumpjumper — released in 1981 as the first mass-produced mountain bike — was Sinyard's recognition that the Marin builders had created a category. Chris King, working in Sotto Voce, New Mexico, and later Portland, Oregon, built headsets and hubs to tolerances that the bicycle industry had never demanded. His refusal to compromise on precision established a standard that influenced every component manufacturer who followed.
The frame material wars that consumed cycling from the 1990s onward — steel versus aluminum versus titanium versus carbon fiber — are, at their core, arguments about craft. Steel can be brazed or welded by a skilled individual in a small shop. Titanium requires argon shielding and specialized technique but rewards the builder with a material that does not fatigue, does not corrode, and rides like nothing else. Carbon fiber requires molds, layup schedules, autoclaves, and factory infrastructure that no individual builder can replicate. Each material transition moved the locus of production further from the individual craftsperson and closer to the factory.
Small builders have survived by choosing the materials that reward handwork. Surly, out of Minneapolis, built an ethos around affordable steel frames designed for real conditions — commuting, touring, winter riding — rather than race performance. Cotic, in the Peak District of England, builds steel mountain bike frames designed for British trail conditions by people who ride British trails. Niner, founded in 2005, committed early to 29-inch wheels and built frames around a geometry philosophy that prioritized stability over agility.
In motorcycle culture, the custom builder tradition runs even deeper. From the postwar bobber and chopper builders who stripped military surplus Harleys to their essentials, through the cafe racer revival of the 2000s, to contemporary builders like Deus Ex Machina and Revival Cycles, the motorcycle has been a medium for individual expression through metalwork, engine modification, and frame fabrication. The builder's shop — welding torch, english wheel, metal brake — is as much a cultural space as the road.
What these builders share, across disciplines, is the belief that the person who makes the thing should understand how the thing is ridden. That feedback loop — build, ride, adjust, rebuild — is what distinguishes craft from manufacturing. Manufacturing optimizes for consistency. Craft optimizes for response.
Chapter 3: Trail Builders
The Invisible Architects
There is a particular kind of person who spends their Saturday mornings moving dirt so that other people can have a better ride. They arrive before dawn with hand tools. They cut drainage, bench tread into hillsides, clear fallen timber, and armor creek crossings with stone. They do this for years, sometimes decades, often on land they do not own, sometimes in legal grey areas, frequently without recognition. They are trail builders, and they are the most important people in mountain biking, hiking, and backcountry riding that nobody talks about.
The International Mountain Bicycling Association — IMBA — codified trail building standards in the 1990s, establishing guidelines for grade, outslope, drainage, and sustainability that transformed what had been an ad hoc practice into a discipline with shared knowledge. IMBA's Trail Solutions program trained builders worldwide and created a common language for trail design. The principles are straightforward: trails should shed water, follow the contour of the land, and be built to a grade that prevents erosion. Executing those principles on real terrain, with real soil and real rainfall patterns, requires judgment that no manual can fully convey.
The tension in trail building today is between machine-built flow trails and hand-cut technical trails. A flow trail — smooth, bermed, predictable — can be built in days by a small excavator and a skilled operator. A technical trail — rocky, rooted, requiring the rider to read and react — takes months of hand work and responds to the specific character of the terrain rather than imposing a template upon it. Both have value. But they represent fundamentally different philosophies of what a trail is for. The flow trail says: the trail should make the rider feel good. The technical trail says: the trail should make the rider pay attention.
Trail builders I interviewed for this study described their work in terms that echo every other maker in this document. They talked about reading the land the way a shaper reads a blank — looking for the line that is already there, the natural fall line that wants to be a trail. They talked about the satisfaction of drainage that works, of a corner that rides clean, of a rock feature that challenges without punishing. They talked about building something and then watching a stranger ride it for the first time, not knowing who built it, and smiling.
Many of the world's most celebrated trail networks were built by volunteers. The extensive singletrack systems of the Pacific Northwest, the technical moorland trails of the Peak District, the hand-built networks of Finale Ligure in Italy — these were not government projects or commercial developments. They were built by riders who wanted trails to exist and were willing to do the work. The builders often remain anonymous by choice. The trail is the point, not the credit.
What is at risk is not the existence of trails but the knowledge of how to build them well by hand. As trail building becomes professionalized — and it should, because professional builders produce more sustainable trails — the volunteer tradition that built the sport's foundational infrastructure is fading. Fewer young riders show up to dig days. The machine does in hours what the hand crew did in months. The efficiency gain is real. What is lost is the relationship between the builder and the land — the intimacy that comes from moving every rock and cutting every root yourself, from knowing the trail not as a line on a map but as a thousand individual decisions made with a tool in your hand.
Chapter 4: Ramp Builders and Park Designers
From Plywood to Concrete to Olympic Venues
The backyard ramp is one of the origin myths of skateboarding, and like most origin myths, it is true enough to matter. Before there were skateparks, there were ramps — quarter pipes, half pipes, launch ramps — built in driveways and backyards by skaters who needed transitions and could not find them. The materials were plywood and two-by-fours. The engineering was intuitive. The results were sometimes dangerous and sometimes transcendent.
The first wave of commercial skateparks appeared in the mid-to-late 1970s — Carlsbad, Pipeline, Upland — and they were built by people who were inventing park design in real time. The skateparks of that era were concrete bowls and snake runs, built by pool contractors who understood curved concrete but did not always understand skateboarding. When the liability insurance crisis of the early 1980s closed nearly all of them, the ramp went back to the backyard, and the half pipe became the defining structure of 1980s skateboarding. The vert ramp that Tom Stewart built for Tony Hawk was not a commercial product. It was a piece of folk architecture.
Professional park design emerged in the 1990s from the wreckage of the first skatepark era. California Skateparks, founded by former pro skater Willy Santos and designer Joe Ciaglia, brought rider knowledge directly into the design process. Dreamland Skateparks, founded by Mark "Red" Scott in the Pacific Northwest, specialized in concrete parks that responded to local terrain and community input. Grindline, also from the Northwest, built some of the most celebrated concrete parks in the world, including the Lincoln City park in Oregon that became a pilgrimage site.
What these designers understood — and what distinguishes good park design from bad — is that a skatepark is not a collection of obstacles. It is a composition. The way one feature flows into another, the sight lines, the speed relationships, the variety of terrain within a single space — these are design decisions that determine what riding is possible. A badly designed park produces one kind of skating. A well-designed park produces dozens.
The DIY ethic never disappeared. Burnside, built under the Burnside Bridge in Portland starting in 1990, was constructed illegally by skaters who poured concrete at night and dared the city to tear it down. The city eventually sanctioned it. FDR Skatepark in Philadelphia followed a similar trajectory — guerrilla construction that became an institution. These parks are rough, idiosyncratic, and beloved precisely because they were built by the people who ride them. They carry the aesthetic and functional preferences of their builders in every line and curve.
The arc from Burnside to the 2024 Paris Olympic skateboard venue tells the entire story of how riding culture scales. The Olympic park was engineered to television specifications, designed for judging legibility, and built to standards that guaranteed safety and consistency. It was a good park. It was also a park that could have been built anywhere for any purpose. The DIY parks are specific. They belong to their place and their community. They cannot be franchised. That specificity is what makes them matter, and it is what professional park design must learn from rather than replace.
Chapter 5: The Disappearing Trades
What Is Lost When Craft Becomes Manufacturing
In a village in the Dolomites, there is a man who has been making ski boots by hand for forty years. He takes a plaster cast of the skier's foot, carves a last from that cast, and builds the shell and liner around it. The boots fit as nothing mass-produced can fit. His clients include former World Cup racers and recreational skiers who have tried everything else and found it inadequate. He is seventy-one years old. He has no apprentice. When he stops working, the knowledge that lives in his hands — the understanding of how a foot transmits force to a ski, how a millimeter of cant adjustment changes a turn, how the shell should flex at the ankle but not at the heel — will be gone.
I encountered versions of this story in every discipline I researched. The saddle maker in Walsall, England, using techniques unchanged since the nineteenth century, whose clients are aging out of equestrian sport and whose children have no interest in learning the trade. The surfboard glassor in Huntington Beach — not the shaper, the glassor, the person who lays fiberglass cloth and resin over the shaped blank to create the board's hard shell — whose job is being eliminated by factory production in Southeast Asia and whose skill, developed over decades, is worth exactly nothing on the open market. The wheel builder in a bicycle shop who can tension and true a wheel by feel, whose work is being replaced by machine-built wheels that are good enough for most riders and cheaper by a factor of ten.
These are not nostalgic laments. The factory produces affordable, consistent products that make riding accessible to more people. That is an unambiguous good, and no honest study can pretend otherwise. The saddle that costs four hundred dollars is not as good as the one that costs four thousand, but it allows someone to ride who could not otherwise afford to. Study 007 documented the economic barriers to riding culture. Mass manufacturing lowers those barriers. That matters.
But there is a knowledge problem that economics cannot solve. The hand trades carry embodied knowledge — understanding that exists in the practitioner's body and cannot be fully transferred to documentation, video, or digital files. When a boot maker retires, the technical specifications of his boots can be recorded. The feel cannot. When a surfboard glassor stops working, the chemistry of her resin mixes can be written down. The judgment about how humidity and temperature and the specific blank in front of her should change today's layup schedule — that judgment walks out the door with her.
The Collective has a role here. Not to preserve these trades in amber — that would be both impossible and condescending — but to document them with the same rigor and respect we bring to documenting riders and their stories. The maker interview should be a standard format in the archive: who they are, what they build, how they learned, what they know that nobody has written down, and what will happen when they stop. These interviews should be recorded on video, because the hands matter. Watching a shaper work tells you things that no transcript can capture.
Several institutions are already doing this work. The Surf Heritage and Culture Center in San Clemente houses surfboard collections and shaper archives. The Bicycle Museum of America preserves frames and components. The Smithsonian's Lemelson Center documents invention and craft across industries. But these are collection-based institutions. The Collective's contribution should be process-based: not the board, but the boarding. Not the frame, but the brazing. The knowledge is in the doing, and the doing is what disappears.
Conclusion: Every Ride Is a Collaboration
I want to end this study with something simple.
The next time you ride — whatever you ride, wherever you ride it — look down. Look at the object under your feet, under your hands, under your body. Someone made that. Someone chose the materials, designed the geometry, shaped the surfaces, joined the pieces. Probably someone you have never heard of. Possibly someone who is no longer alive.
And look around. If you are on a trail, someone built it. If you are in a park, someone designed it. If you are on a wave, someone shaped the board that allows you to be there. The terrain and the tool — both were made, and both carry the knowledge and care of their makers.
Riding culture has always celebrated the rider. That is natural. The rider is visible, dynamic, beautiful in motion. The maker is in a dusty room or a muddy hillside or a welding bay, and the work is slow and unglamorous and finished long before anyone sees the result.
But the rider without the maker is a person standing on flat ground with nothing under their feet. Every ride is a collaboration. The archive must honor both halves.
This study is the beginning of that work. I am asking the Collective to build a makers' index within the archive — a searchable, documented record of the shapers, builders, welders, trail crews, park designers, and tradespeople who built what riders ride. I am asking for maker interviews to become a standard research format, with video, alongside the oral histories we already collect. And I am asking every Guardian who reads this to think about who built what they ride, to learn that person's name if they can, and to say it out loud.
The riders are the culture. The makers are the ground it stands on.
Study 010 is the second entry in The Riding Collective's expanded research series, following the eight foundational studies completed in early 2026. The expanded series addresses gaps identified during the foundational research program. Upcoming studies will examine the role of photography and film in shaping riding identity (Study 011), the environmental ethics of riding in fragile ecosystems (Study 012), and the economics of independent media in riding culture (Study 013).
Correspondence: dr.solvik@theridingcollective.com