Jimmy Lewis Board Workshop tour and interview, Episode #31

The Blue Planet Show

Aloha friends, it's Robert Stehlik. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Blue Planet Show. Today's show is extra special. I got to meet with Jimmy Lewis. Derek and Lucas and I visited his workshop in Haiku in Maui, where We, he showed us his whole workshop, gave us a full tour, showed us his house as well. He even gave us t shirts and signed them.

This is the t shirt he gave me. So that was a super fun trip and I highly recommend watching this one on YouTube. I'll post it as a podcast as well if you're doing other things. But the visuals are great. He shows us the full tour of his factory, his dust collection system, how to shape a board from basically hot cutting it with a hot wire cutting the blanks installing inserts foil tracks his philosophy on shaping and how he was inspired by sea planes when he developed some of the early foil boards.

and showed us a hydrodynamic plate mount that he developed for the air chair and then how to get sharp edges when you're glassing, how to shape a twisted V tail. So he's not holding back, sharing whatever he knows. So cool of Jimmy to give us all the details. And at the end of the interview, I'll also make some special announcements about the Molokai race, a couple other things.

Stay tuned to the very end. Thanks so much for watching, and without further ado, here is Jimmy Lewis. Tell me again about the design and how you came up with that kind of, the, this guy, Vitor Marcal, he's a lifeguard captain on the North Shore now, right? And he's been a lifeguard for as long as I've known him.

I've known him for a little over 20 years. And he was one of the first guys foiling when Laird first started foiling and using the boots, to bolt themselves onto the board and those air chair foils. They had like snowboard bindings, right? Yeah. So they just And so Vitor was pretty progressive on it, to know that he needed to adjust his foot straps sometimes or his bindings.

So he had me put these tracks on. And, Vitor was really good. He could do jumps and backflips on a wave with that air chair, and he'd said, Yeah, when I jump up, jump, and I come down for a landing, my board would always stick. And he asked me what kind of shape could I do so it wouldn't stick so much. And the first thing I thought of was a seaplane, because they're made to land on water.