A.J. Finan is a 30-something shaper from Melbourne Beach, Florida. With twenty years of shaping experience to his name, and an engineering degree from the University Of Central Florida, A.J. and his label Cannibal surfboards have become a solid fixture in surf shops up and down the Eastern seaboard. In certain situations though, shaping can lend itself to a monotonous, industrial-like process—mowing foam to fill orders and nothing more.

In 2006 A.J. began tinkering with new board constructions, as any curious mind constantly on hyper-drive tends to do. Most summers he loads a U-Haul trailer packed with boards and makes the trek up I-95, stopping at every one of his accounts. On this particular trip, when he arrived at the Surf Shack in Ship Bottom, New Jersey he emerged from humidity appearing to be hopped up on even more Red Bulls than normal, going a mile-a-minute about “vacuum bagging.”

He had found a new vigor for shaping, as what began with one vacuum bagged board (actually a half carbon fiber, half polyester concoction), four years later has transformed his entire production over to vacuum bagging and away from polyurethane. The creation of his new vacuum bagging company, CoreVac, has moved surfboards to what he believes are the fastest, most durable, lightest, and efficient quite possibly on this Earth by creating a controllable environment within the bag to get the most out of higher-grade materials. We attempted to get into the mind behind these potential game changers.—Ryan Brower

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