We here at the Temple of Enthusiasm are constantly trying to push the envelope when it comes to Deus Surfboards and our ‘Shapers in Residence’ program. Whether it’s with established shapers bringing their vaults of knowledge, like Bob McTavish and Neal Purchase Jr or with the young guns like Ryan Burch and Tyler Warren with their new and fresh outlooks on the craft.
This is the story of what happens when you combine the two schools of thought.
First, we have to introduce Mike Minchinton. Mike has been shaping for the better part of 40 years along-side Robert August and Mark Martinson who were part of the Bruce Brown Endless Summer era of surfing. Now we have to introduce Dustin Humphrey. Dustin if you didn’t know already, has been a long time Bali resident and is the co-founder of the Temple of Enthusiasm here in Canggu. Now back in the day, Mike used to shape most of Dustin’s boards when he was a kid growing up in Huntington Beach in California. He has actually hand shaped a lot of people's boards over the years and is considered somewhat of an underground shaping legend. Don’t believe us? Ask Alex Knost.
So knowing Mike for pretty much 2 decades, Dustin also knew Forrest Minchinton, Mikes son, when he was a grom. And it just so happened that they ended up reconnecting with each other randomly over Instagram a couple of years ago, meeting up in person at a motocross track in California and shooting the shit, catching each other up on what had happened in the last almost 20 or so years. It turned out that Forrest had followed his Dad's dusty footsteps into surfboard shaping, and was even shaping under the same roof as his pops. Dustin, impressed with Forrest’s skill both behind the handle-bars of a motorcycle and behind the planer in the shaping bay, invited Forrest to come check out what we were up to out here in Bali. So a couple months later, Forrest was on a plane to Bali to come see what the Temple of Enthusiasm was all about. He ended up staying longer than expected, riding bikes, surfing and shaping Deus boards for a couple months before heading home to Cali.
Now skip forward a year, Forrest heads back to Bali with Mike, and Dustin gets reunited with his first shaper after over 20 years. The Father-Son duo set up shop in the Deus shaping bay and it didn’t take long for Mike to get into the flow of what we do here. He saw that we don’t just make ‘retro’ shapes to throw on the racks and sell, but instead we let ideologies of the past influence the boards we shape now, and by doing so end up creating some great looking boards that work well in really good waves. For the most part, the pair worked on their own shapes, usually poking a head in here n’ there to make some sort of comment with a beer in hand while the other shaped. When it came to Forrest and Zye cutting foam to shape Zye a fish, Mike stepped in to give his 2 cents and they ended up tag teaming the board, adding some channels to the bottom and some wooden blocks to the fishes tail, ending up with a collaboration of the utmost quality.
The simple and sleek boards that Forrest and Mike shaped during their time here, combined with the wooden tail blocks Mike crafts by hand, really produced some gorgeous pieces of surfable art. It’s been a nice change for the Deus retail store’s surf racks to have some Californian influenced longboards because most of our shapers hail from Australia, and anybody who knows what they are talking about when it comes to logs knows that the difference between a Californian log and an Australian log is quite prominent.
Once again we have dug deep to push the boundaries of what comes out of the Deus Shaping bay, and by combining the time tested knowledge one of the best underground shapers in the world his own son’s fresh views on the matter, we have ended up producing some amazing new boards.
