01 / Dispatch

The Why

Why we built this platform and how we're trying to help the surf community find ding repair they can actually trust.

By Jan Steinhoff Filed March 3, 2026

A weathered surfboard repair workshop — racks of foam and resin lit by a single hanging bulb. — Fig. 01 Where most boards get a second life — somewhere between a garage and a gallery.

Ok, so maybe let’s start here — why the name DingShacks?

Looking for surfboard repair, while usually being a giant annoyance, has one charming aspect: you get to meet some true salt-of-the-earth people who, usually self-taught, are willing and hopefully able to fix your board. More often than not they are operating out of some rugged garage, an old shipping container, or any other kind of rustic shack.

Quite frequently these ding-repair folks are also shaping boards and are otherwise creative or artistically inclined. Their little workshops turn out to be really cool, inspiring places more often than not.

You’re on a trip, your board takes a hit, and suddenly you need to find someone you can trust.

The Real Why

I touched on it — we all know the feeling. You’re on a trip, your board takes a hit, and suddenly you need to find someone who can fix it. Fast. Trip’s ending soon. Waves are great. But how do you find a repair shop you can trust when you’re sort of unfamiliar with a place?

You head to the nearest bigger surf shop — if there is one — and ask. You ask other surfers around, sure. However, this takes time and requires driving around, and in the end you still know next to nothing about the person who will perhaps repair your board.

To be fair, you can find some information using Google, some shops are on Facebook or Instagram, but a ton of them are not, and information is highly fragmented.

Fig. 02 A typical shack — rustic, productive, somehow holding it all together.

So I believe it would be a giant time-saver if we — as a community — could document and foster a list of all the shacks we come across, keep them up to date, endorse the good ones, and thereby help essentially everyone involved. The shaper or ding-repair person is more easily found by us, and we get reliable help quicker.

The Idea in a Nutshell

We want to enable a couple of things:

Find — repair shops wherever we need them, fast.
Trust — provide some level of confidence that a repair shop will deliver, through community reviews and verification.
Connect — directly with the repair shops, no intermediaries.

If you run a shack

We want to help you get found.

And help you present yourself a little better while you’re at it. Less time wrangling a website, more time shaping.

Wrapping things up…

At one point after newly moving to Portugal, to get a repair I fully trusted, I was driving from the Alentejo region to Ericeira and back. Twice. Probably 200–250 EUR in gasoline, tolls and the repair itself. It was an important board to me, so trusting that the person would do a good job was essential. So all in all still worth it. But honestly, it shouldn’t have been necessary.

Later I found out there are pretty good repair shops around Alentejo as well. So yeah — wish there had been a DingShacks then.

Join In

Whether you’re a surfer looking for repair or a shop owner looking for customers, join the community. You absolutely don’t need to if you just want to find a surfboard repair shop near you, but you could create an account to get started. This thing will only be as good as the participation we put into it.