The cost of a surfboard is directly related to the current price of oil. Almost everything we use in the building of a board is petroleum based. The blank, fiberglass, tape, and especially the resin is produced from oil. So during the summer when the oil prices were going crazy so were the other prices. Resin is purchased by the pound and usually shipped in 55 gallon drums. Each week this summer a pound of resin was going up by a minimum of 5 cents per pound per week. This doesn’t seem like a lot but imagine how much a full 55 gallon drum weighs and multiply that by an increase of 5 cents per pound. This happened every week and sometimes twice a week for 3 months. At the Austin Factory we would order about 3 drums per week during our busy months. If my memory serves me correctly we spent almost $55,000 dollars on resin alone. This accounted for a 20% increase in the cost of building surfboards. Here is the crazy part. Since the oil prices have tumbled down guess how notifications of decreases we have received in the price of resin? ZERO! NONE! ZILCH! How can this be? They all blamed the rise in price on the oil prices and now the cost remains the same. Why? The craziest increase we saw during this time was with 3M tape. We go through tons of masking tape and it can’t be the cheap stuff or it leaves glue behind and then you are in real trouble. An average cost for the “good stuff” in 3M 2 inch tape was $2.15 per roll at the beginning of the summer. By the end of the summer a 2 inch roll of tape was costing over $5.15. Over a 50% increase. This is crazy. Again, have the prices of tape gone down with the oil? NOPE! So the next time you go to purchase a surfboard ask for either regular, unleaded, or premium (of course Austin Surfboards would be your premium brand!).
