Griffin Colapinto’s New Favourite Board Was Shaped In 1996
How a late 1990s Andy Irons …Lost surfboard was brought back into production.
A person who makes their living selling surfboards, some from SITD-winning labels, was recently heard complaining that “kids” are not willing to pay full price for brand new shop boards and are finding over-20-year-old used ones on the second hand market instead.
In hyper-accelerationist times, surfing still allows for a moment of disconnection, and perhaps resistance. The younger generations have resorted to beat-up cars, vintage handheld camcorders, rolled cigarettes, hand-me-down below-the-knee boardshorts from their older, divorced, slightly overweight, golf-playing brothers, and yellowed, rockered-out surfboards from the “Dream Tour” era.
“Crosby, Griffin and those guys were in my office,” WSL Shaper Rankings leader Matt Biolos told Stab, “there’s a mezzanine above my desk with like 200 boards piled up, it’s like a hoarder’s den with boards from 1987 all the way through to something that Cole [Houshmand] would have broken a year ago.”
Curious Crosby got up on a ladder and started pulling boards down to inspect. His immediate reaction was, “Fuck, let’s ride all these!”
“We patched up a bunch of them, went down to Lowers on a head high day and filmed the boys riding boards from the 80s all the way through, to let’s say, the board Julian [Wilson] won the US Open on in 2012,” Biolos said. “We then made an edit and screened it at a bunch of parties, including some at the US Open.”
For reasons that Biolos cannot quite recall, the video never ended up on YouTube or any of …Lost’s social channels, until now.
Its highlight was Griffin Colapinto tearing into Lowers on a board that used to belong to the late Andy Irons. Originally shaped in 1996, Andy rode it mostly the year after. Griffin loved it so much that he insisted Biolos make him an adjusted version.
Griffin took a brand new, unreleased ‘97 AI Exacta PRO out, ripped on it as per usual, and before long everybody else on the team wanted one. Biolos immediately decided to include it in the 2026 line, coincidentally 30 years after the original was made.
“I had it scanned because I design most of my boards in CAD,” Biolos said. “We actually used a probe scanner. Kind of the way people used computer shaping machines in the 90s — you’d shape a plug and send it to a guy to scan it before we started designing [digitally].”
Biolos started using the CAD program around the late 1990s. “Before that we just did copycat scans and changed the dimensions,” he said. “I had it [Andy’s board] scanned and then tried to recreate it with the same stringers we used back then,” he said, referring to the quarter-inch blonde spruce stringers of the era. His involvement was so obsessive that he also dug up a couple hundred old 1-inch diameter leash plugs and set about replicating the board’s original glass-on fins.
Those fins, Biolos said, “were made in Texas by Air Core and popularised by Slater in that old Al Merrick template. But they’ve been long out of business.”
“The last guy to really make a name for himself with glass-on, hollow, ultra light fins was Greg Trotter of Soar Fins in Australia.” Staying true to his preference for local production, Matt turned to Futures to replicate the exact fins Andy had under his right foot three decades ago. The replicas were made in the same colour and with the same sized hexagonal pattern inserts under the resin.
The standard back then was for all fins to be glassed on. Biolos only installed his first FCS plug around 1997, and from the moment Kelly’s involvement legitimised the system, more boards began to fit in boardbags, and some boardbags began slimming down. Whichever came first.
Taj Burrow, for example, “didn’t stop using glass-ons until 2013 or so,” Matt said. “In my first couple years working with him (2011, 2012) he won a couple of events on them. He won Snapper on one and I still have some of those boards.” Taj was one of the last CTers to change over to removables.
While the original idea was to fit the ‘97 exclusively with glass-ons, feedback from surf shops, sales reps, and distributors led Biolos to reconsider the decision. “We’re offering it with Futures as well. Shops think it’s a viable board and people are wanting to jump on that nostalgic appeal, but they don’t think it’s that easy to stock glass-ons only.”
In Biolos’ opinion, the Futures version should feel a little faster and glidier because there’s less drag around the base, caused by the extra resin around the glass-ons, which he believes creates more grip and control. He compares it to an airplane wing attaching to the fuselage: “It creates drag, but drag also creates grip.”
The fin template closely mirrors a classic Al Merrick template made famous by Kelly and Lisa Andersen and exists in the catalogues of most reputable fin manufacturers today.
The blank used was the same as the original board’s (US Blanks), and in true revivalist spirit, the dims were pencilled in fractions, rather than decimals, like they did before computers took over shaper’s lives.
Andy’s original was a 6’2” and followed the trend of that time when boards were generally longer and narrower than the average HP shortboard of today. “There’s a perfect 5’11” lying inside it,” Biolos said. “If you cut off the nose and re-template it and cut an inch off the tail and re-template it, it ends up looking very close to a modern 5’11”.”
The remake is, in his words, “more minimalistic.” The ‘97 has a single-to-double concave, softer, rounder rails, and a touch of vee through the deck. “The deck really vees down from the stringer line down to the rails, and the rails are like a really thin round ball. It’s also got a little bit of vee from the middle of the back fin through the tail, which was kind of my thing back then,” he said.
Despite never riding it in competition, Andy rode the board with the purple airbrush on the Gold Coast, and during the fall of ’96 at Log Cabins. Some of that footage was featured in Stab’s four-part documentary series Andy Irons and The Radicals. This predates Andy’s Billabong years and CT dominance. At the time he still rode for Gotcha’s More Core Division — both now extinct.
This was also before Andy’s affair with JS and what would become an era dominated by Gold Coast shapers like Stevenson himself, Darren Handley, and even Ian Byrne (Mt Woodgee) and Murray Bourton, who were making a great number of surfboards on tour.
In a little publicised full circle moment, Griff rode his version at this year’s Gold Coast Pro which is further testament that it’s far from a nostalgia-dipped collectible wall hanger.
Biolos told us that this past winter, Gian Bernini, Lost’s long-time Global Marketing Director and Team Manager, was in Hawaii with Griffin and Crosby. Rockies was as good as it gets, close to maxing out, but still holding.
“Gian’s like, ‘Okay, you haven’t ridden any of the alternative boards and I’ve been here for 10 days and Matt’s going to kill me because I’m basically here on vacation and I need you guys to ride some of those.'”
Their ‘97s were both on hand, so Gian told them, “500 bucks to whoever puts together the best edit from today.” They surfed them for four or five hours and the session, as Bernini later described it to Biolos, was “fucking gold.”
We’ll find a place for that edit on the site as soon as we get our hands on it. In the meantime, Mikey C has also had a ’97 AI Exacta PRO made for himself, which he’ll be taking for a Joyride very soon.
Check out more details on the board here. Partial proceeds from all sales will go to the Andy Irons Foundation.
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