Aaron Porter Blueprint Surf co-founder Mike Ballin has built upwards of 60 custom surfboards. He and business partner Luke Diehl are committed to 3D printing the core structure of surfboards to accommodate design variation and evolution, and to limit the environmental impact of the sport.
Reading the Small Print
Easily stored in a garage or closet and transportable on a bicycle, surfboards are some of the simplest buoyant watercraft on the market today. But as any haiku poet or headline writer can attest, it’s a mistake to equate simple with easy. Getting the little things right can be just as challenging and gratifying as solving the complex equations.
The advantage that simplicity of form and scale offers the creative mind is an opportunity to try out new ideas in design and construction with minimal risk given the modest investment in time and materials. You also know pretty quickly whether your latest notion is a success or failure.
No surprise, then, that surfboards offer a promising experimental platform for boatbuilding industry innovators trying out new construction materials and methods. While searching for boatbuilders who use 3D printing for structural components, I found a case in point in my seasonal hometown (Portland, Maine): Blueprint Surf Co. has been printing the core structure of their innovative custom surfboards as a startup business since 2022.
Aaron Porter Two halves of a 3D-printed surfboard core structure before initial fairing and installation of GRP skin laminates.
Co-founders Mike Ballin and Luke Diehl don’t claim to be the first to try it, but they may be among the most persistent, having printed and tested dozens of boards in their quest to get it right. Diehl’s background is in medical devices, including some 3D-printed titanium products. Ballin’s experience is in environmental consulting. They met seven years ago surfing the cold waters of southern Maine. Their shared passion and diverse skills led to the creation of Blueprint.
Aaron Porter Ballin inspecting the skin of a Screaming Gull model board from Blueprint’s model line. Note the core vent and tether attachment points at the aft end of the board.
Ballin’s priority is to minimize the environmental impact of the boards they build by using recycled and renewable materials wherever possible. Diehl brought his 3D-printing and business experience to the table.
Currently the boards’ core lattice structures are printed at a rate of one per week on a modest machine with a 2′ x 6′ (0.6m x 1.8m) bed at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute in Portland. Ballin said the Roux partnership has also helped with engineering and adjusting print materials as the build process has evolved. Ballin does the laminating and finish work in his shop.
In the rafters of the unassuming South Portland garage where Ballin fairs and applies fiberglass and Entropy bio-based epoxy resin to the printed cores, there’s a collection of broken boards that chart Blueprint’s evolution. They’re not pretty to look at, but they reveal many of the lessons learned.
The first board they built was strong and very heavy, Balin said. “You couldn’t sell anything like a third of its weight.”
The printed structural lattice of the early boards comprised a roughly square horizontal grid with round holes printed into the vertical structure. The failure mode was obvious—the grid would crack along the lines of the fine 3D-printed plastic layers applied by the printer in a stack from the bottom of the board to the top.
Aaron Porter Ballin’s early printed prototypes were tested on the water and often broke when the printed laminate failed in shear. It was unable to dissipate the force of a surfer’s foot slammed down on the deck.
Like any lightly built boat, each board is a kinetic structure subject to many interacting forces and movements. The greatest force the board would be subjected to in common use is a surfer’s heel driving into the deck. “The lattice structure needed to be able to dissipate that energy quickly and efficiently,” Ballin said.
To avoid the pillar failure of the earliest boards, they changed printer orientation so that the layers of printed plastic were laid down with each half of the board standing on edge.
Aaron Porter Using recycled material from polypropylene fishing nets, Ballin optimized printer orientation, so the individual stands laid down horizontally by the print nozzle were oriented vertically in the final installation. Note how minimal the bonding area between the core grid and the laminate skins are—another area of structural challenge.
In addition, they changed the lattice to more complex polygonal forms and installed a longitudinal wood spine between the two halves of some boards. Ballin noted that the lattice structure is also limited by the maximum void span he’s confident he can bridge with his proprietary method of applying the first layer of glass to the printed core. On the newest boards, the polygons visible through the deck (it’s an appealing signature look) vary in size based on the designed use of the board.
Another structural challenge familiar to composite boatbuilders is the bond between the core and the fiberglass skin. When glassing to the printed lattice “you have such a small surface area to bond to, whatever you’re bonding has to be really strong,” Ballin said. The early boards reveal a few failures and imaginative attempts to increase bond strength and prevent sagging of the skins.
The current solution for bonding the core and skin is the one element of Blueprint’s build method that Ballin won’t share for publication. But the rest of his glassing process is simple fairing of the printed core structure and multiple hand-laid glass laminates finished with sealer and a couple of hot coats of epoxy faired with 300-grit sandpaper. So, while the cores may be 3D-printed, these boards depend on refined hand skills and craftsmanship for their buoyancy, structure, and final finish.
Ballin said after building 50 boards, he feels like his fiberglass skills are getting to where he wants them to be. Similarly, the printed cores are finally reliably repeatable and consistent. (They’ve had to switch between polypropylene from recycled fish nets and more common recycled PETG in 2024 when a Dutch supplier of the former went out of business.) He sees room for more improvement.
“I still want to get a kilogram-and-a-half off the boards right now,” he said.
Structure aside, the business model is equally challenging for these custom-built, environmentally optimized boards. “What we’re looking to replace is the foam core, and that is already so cheap that with all our material costs and printing time, we’re working with a pretty small margin,” Ballin said. His current turnaround time for a board (including six days printing) is two weeks.
Aaron Porter The range of shapes and sizes in Ballin’s library of surfboards speaks to the experimentation and innovation in shapes and structures that custom printing invites.
Keeping labor to a minimum is essential, as is marketing the customizability of a Blueprint board to consumers willing to pay more for a tailored fit. To that end, Ballin said he’s working with reputable board-shapers like Alan Emery of Australia to be able to offer their designs built with Blueprint technique.
Offering a variety of boards from diverse designers would be hard to do with series-built injection-molded boards. But with 3D printing, you aren’t tied to a single mold shape that determines the exact form of every board (or boat) you build. The versatility of the technology encourages refinement of shapes informed by use and on-water performance.
