Surfing and Sustainability with Ig Wilkinson
Our "Create Your Own Vision" Series is all about celebrating the visionaries among us. Those who are doing exciting and interesting things within their field, those who have a good story to tell! We want to use our reach to champion these people, and hopefully inspire others to create and innovate.
As part of this series, we caught up with surfboard builder Ig Wilkinson (Devon, UK). When he’s not surfing, he’s designing and making all sorts - including casting surfboard fins out of recycled beer cans.
Watch the video for some beautiful surfing footage, and to hear from Ig himself on his vision.
Ig's Instagram | Videography by ShutterMountainMedia | Second track "Sun Lounger" by DJ O-One (rights reserved by artist)
Transcript:
If you’ve grown up by the sea, it’s very difficult to not be back by the sea. You can go away for a while, but I think it’s deeply-rooted in everyone, that connection.
At the beginning, it was about wanting to have particular boards (which would cost heaps of money) which turned into experimenting with different ideas. When you think of something, you can just apply it and see if it works.
With the surfboards I started shaping fibreglass boards, and then realised it was making my arms itch and getting me covered in fibreglass. This stuff has been done before, but it has never been developed with modern ideas.
So that was where I started developing these ideas, and thinking about these different things.
I’ve been playing with making different fins over the years, different constructions of fins, but primarily wood-core fins. Recently I’ve been casting some skate trucks out of beer cans. One of my mates that was over said why don’t you make some fins out of the beer cans too.
I hadn’t really thought about aluminium fins before because it seemed like a weird thing to do. The properties are actually amazing, you’ve got flex, you’ve got everything you’ve got in a fibreglass fin but it’s one single thing which you can pour essentially, and cast.
It would really look cool, with a polished up aluminium fin, at the same time as potentially functioning really well and we would be recycling. So we’ll get to see if they really work or not!
