Why DingShacks
Celebrating the craft of surfboard building — and making it easy for surfers to find skilled repair, and for repair shops to find new customers.
I needed repair I could trust.
I couldn’t find it.
My name is Jan. I love surfing and I constantly ding my boards. By now I have kind of learned how to fix them, but I don’t enjoy it much.
After moving to Portugal a few years ago, my go-to board started delaminating badly. I needed a proper repair but couldn’t find anyone nearby that came with a strong enough recommendation to trust them with my favourite board.
I eventually got a good referral — but the shop was over two hours away. I drove there and back two times. Expensive, although it was kind of worth it, but that really shouldn’t be necessary.
It struck me how hard it is to find repair you actually trust. And that matters a lot for a few reasons:
We travel
for surf.
Often we break boards on trips where we don't have local connections. You're in a foreign country, your board is cracked, and you have no idea who to call.
Time
matters.
Trips are short and waves are pumping. You need your board fixed fast — not in three days, not next week. Now.
Fix it sooner,
not later.
Boards are fragile. Water gets into the foam, delamination spreads, and suddenly a quick fix becomes a total re-glass. Don't wait.
Boards are
works of art.
Surfboards are beautiful. Mostly shaped by hand, glassed with care, designed for feel and performance. They deserve to be repaired with the same skill and respect they were built with.
They are
uncommon people.
Over the years now I have met so many cool people because of the need to get my boards fixed. The places where they work are often super charming in a rustic way. The people who do the repairs like working with their hands, have usually taught themselves and may be quite artistic in all sorts of ways.
I do have a real soft spot for the small local shapers and board builders / repairers. They are uncommon people, and usually not into marketing what they are doing in any way. That is why DingShacks is also an attempt to help the ding repair shops and small local shapers find business (or rather for the business to find them).
Not to forget — board builders are often quite underpaid for the skill it takes and the material cost. They (have to) live in places by the ocean where rent and real estate prices are rising faster then elsewhere. And they mostly do it for the passion and for repairing and building boards for themselves and their friends.
So supporting the local shaper / ding repair, is definitely one of the main principles at work here. The other is to get us all to surf more and spend less time figuring out how to get our dings fixed.
Creative chaos.
Beautiful spaces.
Be it shipping containers with the doors swung wide open. Garages with decades of resin splatter on the floor. Improvised lean-tos under palm trees with a sanding rack and a dog sleeping underneath.
These places are rarely fancy — they’re raw, functional, and full of character. Boards stacked against walls. Masking sticking to more or less everything. Dust floating through a shaft of light. The smell of catalyst and polyester resin. But also more than just shades of engineering and design.
Pieces of art you can ride on waves.
Inside these cool, scrappy little places, something genuinely magical happens. Someone takes a broken board, sometimes snapped in half, and remakes it a so it looks and works pretty much like the original. Or they pick up a blank foam block and turns it into a thing of beauty — shaped to catch waves, designed for speed, flex, and flow. Every curve has a purpose. Every angle is deliberate.
The same hands that fix your cracked rail also understand hydrodynamics, material science, and the subtle art of making a board that feels alive under your feet. It’s craftsmanship you can ride. It never stops amazing me and the possibilities are endless. But most of all
But most of all, if you found a board that works magic for you, you'll need the right people to fix it and keep the magic alive.