Hand-Shaping, Glassing, And Finishing ’70s-Inspired Displacement Hulls Will Not Make You Rich

Chuck D has plenty to answer for. 

When aspiring Strong Island hip-hop group Leaders of the New School opened for Public Enemy on their 1989 tour, Chuck was tasked with coming up with stage names for the group’s two outlandish leading emcees. The powerful, raspy one he dubbed Busta Rhymes became one of the top-selling rappers in the world, and went on to literally bust rhymes on (forward slash ruin) every RnB themed pop track for most of the late’ 90s/early 2000s. For the other — as talented/charismatic an emcee — Chuck went with Charlie Brown. Shortly after which, the trail goes cold.

Nominative determination, son.

34-year-old Biarritz, France-based displacement hull fanatic Tristan Mausse has a decent handle on nomenclature. His former creative iteration, The Lucky Bastards, was a French glassing duo (alongside Paul Lefevre aka The Son of Cobra) that achieved underground global repute, travelling the world doing bespoke glassing jobs, reviving the then relatively dying art of the resin tint. Then, Tristan launched his own label of unique, visually delicious surfboards, Fantastic Acid. Great, great names all round. 

“I’m the acid maker,” he explains. “You’re gonna take a trip with my boards.”

Tristan grew up close to La Rochelle, France, and started surfing around 8 years old. He quickly became obsessed with surf magazines, but with a kink. “My thing was the shaping bay photos, pictures of the shapers, or even the glassers, the workshop,” he remembers. Fascinated with every aspect of surfboard design and production, on a trip to Australia at 19 Tristan realised there was plenty of employment opportunity in his chosen field among the more unheralded travails. “All the shitty jobs — polishing, resin tints, the things no one wants to do. I quickly found I could get a lot of work doing this stuff.”

Back in SW France, he got a gig at Blend glassing near Hossegor, whose proprietor Fab Morous has a reputation as one of the finest around Europe. Then one day, he and Paul decided to step out alone, offering a mobile service rather than renting a unit. As jobbing glassers full of youthful exuberance and unshackled by overheads, they were soon working for the continent’s best boardmakers, and things escalated fast. “We’d glass at Blend or Euroglass in the morning, go down to Pukas (near San Sebastián, Spain) in the afternoon.” Their dynamic, creative approach won them a solid rep, but most of all it was the quality of their work that stood out. “We did a few tints for Lost at Pukas. They weren’t doing any resin tints at the time. Matt (Biolas) came and was like, “Fuck, that’s unreal. Come to California, stay at my place and glass for us.” He bought us tickets and had like 80 boards ready for us to glass. That was in 2010, when nobody was doing tints, except for the old guys doing the classic cut lap tints. We were trying to bring new stuff, like fluoro colours, and trying to be a bit different. We were loving what we were doing, really pushing it. Paul was fully into the car stuff and rock n’ roll. The 80 tinted boards sold like that, so we did a 100 more. Matt brought us to Brazil, back to California, to Australia…it really opened a lot of doors.” 

A brief inspection of the Fantastic Acid factory reveals Tristan’s surf craft alvinolagnia — belly fetish. “Displacement hulls are boards with a convex bottom (the belly or hull), so the board sits in the water not on top, and the connections are really intense.” First smitten with challenges of riding displacement hulls at 19, Tristan’s commitment to riding the design has been relentless ever since. “I just loved the feeling. I loved that they looked like a UFO; so weird, fin super far forward, rails really foiled, the s-deck. I was really curious, so I started riding them, and fell in love with the whole approach. I think with a board that’s easy to surf, you can get bored — or at least I can. So when I started to shape, I decided to do only that.” 

Going niche hardly makes Tristan unique — even if the designs are pretty unorthodox — indeed it’s often shaping’s specialists, rather than generalists, that make for good copy. But what often follows is an unbending evangelism, where everything is seen through the prism of the design hill they’ve chosen to die on. But Tristan isn’t trying to convert the board buying public to displacement hulls — rather than telling potential customers how the design will revolutionise their surfing and life, he tends to talks down their suitability. “If someone has never ridden this kind of board before, I’ll try to talk them out of ordering one. I’m like, “Maybe you’ll hate it. Are you sure you want that? It might take two months just to get used to it and you won’t be able to ride it everywhere. Maybe it’s not for you.” I don’t care if I have less orders, so long as I get to keep my vision.”

That his vision happens to be mighty good-looking from every angle only adds to the intrigue. The boards really are works of art in every sense. Even the staunchest of HPS conservatives can’t help but gawp at the alluring, subversive curves. “I love the visuals of the ’70s era, when it seemed everyone went crazy, trying everything with no limits, and Fantastic Acid reflects that spirit of experimentation. But if displacement hulls came from 2000s, I would love them the same. So my designs are inspired by that era, but aren’t replicas. Having worked so long glassing boards for pro shortboarders, seeing the edge and the rail, I’m trying to bring that refinement too.”

While parallels are often drawn between a surfer’s personality and the way they ride waves, (fairly spuriously, generally) another Tristan quirk is his surfing/shaping approach matches his socio-economic philosophy. “The way the boards ride, the less you do, the more speed and sensation achieved. That’s the way I look at life; in today’s society, we seem to be obsessed with more — improve more, more performance, work harder, make more money, do more. The idea of just letting it go fits better with my whole philosophy. I don’t want to grow my business, I just want to surf as much as possible and have the time to enjoy my kids growing up. My boards are all hand shaped, which is super exhausting on the body. They take around four hours; displacement hulls are pretty hardcore to shape. Then glassing fins, resin tints, polishing, flex tails, it’s a lot of work. I’m putting a lot of myself into a board, so that it’s hopefully more than just a consumable object. I put the love in because I want the board to last forever.”

As if hewing hulls wasn’t rigourous enough an endeavour, he’s also written and published a weighty tome on the topic: Displacement Myth Approach Vol 1. “I love to archive all the people I meet, the waves I’ve surfed, all my research. I used to write it down in a journal, but if I lose it I’m fucked. So it was a pleasure to write about surfing when it’s flat or at night. The deeper you go, the more satisfaction you get.” Writing a 450-page love letter to his chosen surfcraft niche might be a rarity for a specialist board builder, but perhaps not as much as going on a shaping tour to the North Shore. The Venn diagram overlap of European alt craft shapers going to Hawaii to fill orders might be razor thin, perhaps with a population of one. But that’s where Tristan has just returned from, although he’s keen to downplay the significance of the trip. “Actually, it’s more just due to the fact that in terms of alternative boards over there, there aren’t loads of people doing it. Apart from Brewers, shortboards and pintail guns, there aren’t loads of other options. If you want a tint, glass-on fins and polish, aside from Jack Reeves and a few new younger guys, it’s harder to get that kind of board.”

A global network of displacement hull aficionados, and slightly more than enough orders to keep things ticking over, Tristan’s goals for Fantastic Acid remains to resist growth for growth’s sake, perhaps combine living and working spaces somewhere in the hills behind the Basque coast, rather than paying his current two sets of rent. Out the back, because buying someone on the coast is ever more the preserve of wealthy Parisiens and the like. “For sure some of the market is people with a bit of money who just want a beautiful object. I know they’re never going to be able to surf the board as intended,” he says.  

Surf gentrification, while hardly ideal, might warrant a relatively small violin compared to various other planetary ills. For the highly principled board builder, pinched-nose pragmatism surely comes much easier if it facilitates their own wave count. “Living around here, personally, I think it’s the best place in the world. We have beautiful waves, like crazy good compared to a lot of places I’ve travelled to surf. We seem to get swell all the time. And yeah, these days it’s pretty busy in the surf, but I think you can still get your waves without screaming and being an asshole.”