A board Stab loves: The Spawn, by Chilli

Chilli had never produced a board model with a team rider til Mr Coleborn came along. Mitch’s the perfect mix between Heaven and Hell, power and pop, rail game and airs: The all-rounder. Who better to develop the perfect all-round board with? It’s from this development that we’re gifted The Spawn, having been crafted over months of refinement. Mitch has given a serious qualification push this year riding the Spawn (even rode it to victory in a Brazilian six-star). The board drops today, so let us light up the breeziest call-and-response with The Spawn’s creator, James ‘Chilli’ Cheal.

*FYI, Mitch weighs 75 kilos and rides his 5’10” in 80 percent of conditions.

Stab: Tell me about developing the Spawn with Mitch.
Chilli: A good year and a half ago, I threw him a heap of stuff that I thought was him. I think I was just trying too hard. Basically just through getting rejected, I thought I was gonna miss the boat, so I knocked him out something pretty simple, but with a few highlights on the ones I was really trying on. I put in a more basic design, and that drew him into working with me more. Less was more. A lot of it’s my fault from being in the bay and wanting to keep trying new stuff, but sometimes you should just do a lot of the same stuff ’cause it goes. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Well, I guess there’s design elements that’ve taken 40 years to perfect, and there’s a reason for that. How many boards did it take from the point of you deciding to make Mitch a signature model, to him saying, “This is the one”? I reckon it was seriously the first one. I’d be making something similar for other people on the side, but for him I was thinking it looked too simple to be anything high performance. I thought it was too simple to suit someone of Mitch’s ability. All I did was spice it up really, a bit more concave and a few little things. But it’s just that perfect all-round board for him now.

What’s Mitch like to work with? He’s so fucking fussy. Which is great. I have a marking system I use in my bay, instead of writing measurements for the fin placements, I have a heap of dots and crosses that all mean something to me. If a dot is out, or a cross is in a different spot, he’ll be like, “What’s going on here?” He’s radical. It’s really good. Sometimes we just do little things to keep him on his toes and fire him up.

I love that he’d notice something so small. It’s so good, he’s so on it. Even things like, for some reason we had some blue colouring on the stringer, and it’s gone in the board, and he’ll get it and really question it. And that’s just colour. You can’t relax, which is great for keeping me on my toes.

Get your own Spawn right here.