OCEANSIDE —— Chris Ruddy is a master carver —— whether he's carving a wave, a surfboard or a new niche in the surf industry. Ruddy is president of Ukulele Surfboards in Oceanside, a shop that has turned out handmade boards the old-fashioned way for almost two decades.

When the shop opened in 1988, Ruddy sought out the largely untapped recreational market.

Nearly three years ago, a chance encounter with a country-bred math whiz opened his eyes to new possibilities.

Mark Jolley, a plastics engineer from the tiny town of Marsh Valley, Idaho, wanted to learn to surf after moving to North County for a job. When Jolley visited Ruddy's shop to buy a board, he was puzzled.

"I walked in there and was taken aback to see a shop that was using 1950s technology," Jolley said.

At Ukulele, a board takes 91 hours to make. Ruddy described each creation as a tedious work of art. He starts with a Styrofoam core, called a blank, and shapes it to a designer's specifications. Then the blanks are wrapped in fiberglass and coated with resin. The smell of chemicals is stifling —— and highly toxic, Ruddy said.

A cottage industry

He described surfboard manufacturing as a cottage industry —— an inefficient, stubborn, yet functional one. There's no formal training for the work, and it can take years to master.

Jolley was accustomed to complex, state-of-the-art parts manufacturing. A mass-produced inkjet printer with dozens of moving parts costs less than $100 at an office store, so why should a surfboard be so tough to build?

Ruddy realized Jolley was right.

"This is a piece of foam with fins sticking out," Ruddy said. "This whole industry, literally, has been in a time bubble."

The men teamed up and figured out how to modernize the process and produce a better board: Build it backward. They founded Ocean X Technology and started to raise money for the new idea.

On a shoestring, Jolley designed prototypes for machines that could construct the outer shell of a surfboard first —— so the foam guts could be stuffed inside later. This would lead to a faster, more flexible production process.

Jolley used complicated mathematics and diagrams, something Ruddy never thought he would see in his business.

They form an interesting pair. Ruddy is a Southern California-bred surfer with a muscular tan to show for it. Jolley was raised in a rural farming town hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean —— and he doesn't look like a surfer.

Bridging a gap

"We are surfing's odd couple," Ruddy said. But Jolley's connections in the plastics world took Ocean X off the ground. "He's bridged the gap between the two cultures," Ruddy said.

Jolley struck a deal with GE Polymer Shapes, a plastics company, to get access to a massive piece of equipment in a secret Midwest location.

"This thing is a monster," Jolley said. It's 25 feet tall and 100 feet long, weighs tens of thousands of pounds and uses robotic arms to operate.

The machine normally builds airplane parts, but Jolley designed custom molds for surfboards. Two pieces of see-through polycarbonate —— the same material in fighter-jet windows and bulletproof glass —— are slammed together with enough heat and force to seal the edges.

Total time to build: three minutes. That's hundreds of shells per day, as opposed to seven or eight blanks when shaped by hand at Ukulele. And the shells are practically indestructible, something Jolley likes to show off by beating them with a hammer.

Jolley and Ruddy are so thrilled with the machine, they said, that they plan to build one in Oceanside. It would be a $1.5 million investment and the second such machine in the United States. First they need to find 10,000 square feet of space to house the thing.

Jolley said he can build other molds for the machine and make surfboards in shapes and styles that nobody has dreamed up yet. Want a board that looks like chrome? No problem.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg. The future is completely unlimited," Jolley said.

Adding digital designs

Ocean X can take customization to another level by adding digital graphics to the boards. Customers could bring digital photos to a surf shop, which would e-mail them to Ocean X for printing. The graphics are heat-laminated to the inside of the shell, so they will never peel off in the water, Jolley said. One man took a picture of his Porsche and turned it into his board's design.

When the shell is finished, workers in the Ocean X shop punch tubes in its sides and then fasten it into what looks like an oversized waffle iron. They shoot it up with liquid foam, which bonds to the shell and dries hard.

It's not just any old foam, though. Jolley joined forces with the BASF Group, an international chemicals company, to create foam that's environmentally friendly.

"The surfer, you would imagine, is some environmentally sound guy," Ruddy said. "Using old technology has never been good for the environment."

All of the materials in Ocean X's surfboards are nontoxic and recycled —— a modern contrast to the boards at Ukulele.

Jolley said the foam is also customizable.

He can modify the density and elasticity of the foam with mathematical formulas, and then tweak the numbers in the computer that controls the foaming gun.

"It's all digital. There's no guesswork," Jolley said. A board can be made to any surfer's specifications —— lighter, faster, more flexible.

Up until now, Ruddy said, professional surfers were stuck with highly flexible boards that would break after only a month. Now they can get the same flexibility in boards that last more than a year, he said. The patents are pending.

"The vision is real simple," Ruddy said. "In five years, it's not going to be what you get —— it's what you want."

Cutting time

Ocean X's streamlined process cuts time and labor by 1,000 percent, Ruddy estimated. Now, a board can be finished in two hours —— and surfed the same day it was started.

Despite their excitement, the men's surfboard prototype was worthless until they heard feedback from the people who mattered —— the professionals.

Ruddy, 38, an industry veteran for 20 years, has surfed with legends like Skip Frye, who owns a board shop with his wife San Diego councilwoman Donna Frye, and Joe Roper, the owner of a surfboard repair shop.

He recently loaned a board to local icon Dale Dobson, and they took it for a spin on a big day at Swami's Beach in Encinitas.

Ruddy heard the answer he wanted. "He said, 'It works great. Don't change a thing.'"

Dobson was so impressed he decided to come to work with Ocean X.

"I think Chris and Mark have put a lot of their soul into this," Dobson said. A 35-year veteran, Dobson has enjoyed the evolution of the board from redwood and balsa wood to foam and fiberglass —— and now to the polycarbonate material.

Newfound fans

Ruddy and Jolley have heard consistent praise from other surfers, too, like Rusty Preisendorfer, the founder of the surf company bearing his name. And they have gotten a tremendous response at trade shows —— from both the surfing and plastics communities.

In the last few weeks, Jolley said, Ocean X has started shipping boards to surf shops "up and down the West Coast," including Surfride in Oceanside.

Jolley said the company is receiving more orders than it can fill.

The price of a board depends on the retailer's margins, Jolley said, but it ranges from about $450 to $650 —— about the same as a medium-quality, conventional board.

The company does not want to replace competitors outright, Jolley said. He would rather build boards for them at a price.

The new technology comes at a pivotal time in the surf industry, Ruddy said.

Large surf companies are getting larger and pushing out small shops. They are building higher-quality, higher-cost epoxy boards and sending the work overseas, Ruddy said. Then they charge consumers more for the boards and pump most of their dollars into flashy marketing campaigns.

These companies can produce 50,000 boards every year, Ruddy said. Smaller businesses, like his Ukulele shop, can produce only about 2,500.

The domestic market really started to slip away, Ruddy said, when the large companies attracted the industry's best designers —— except the holdouts.

"The holdouts are saying, 'If it ain't made in America, if it ain't made in California, I ain't doing it.' That gave me hope," Ruddy said.

Ruddy and Jolley are determined to preserve California's identity as a trend-setter and surfing capital.

"My philosophy is to use technology rather than cheap labor to compete," Jolley said. He thinks modernization is the key to staying alive.

Jolley wishes the folks at home in rural Idaho could see him now, he said.

"It would freak out all the local boys."

At the Ocean X shop, rows of colorful, finished boards stand proudly. But tucked in the corner is a board the workers lovingly call "Frankenstein." It's a conventional board, beaten up and wrapped in tape, and about twice as heavy as the slick, new models. Ruddy keeps it there as a humble reminder of his roots.

Despite a serious investment in the new company, Ruddy will still operate Ukulele Surfboards, less than a mile down the road.

"The value of handmade boards will go up," he said, maybe into the thousands of dollars. "It's like taking a low-rider to a custom hot rod show. No one's going to care if it takes a corner well. It's the name on it, the nostalgia."

After all, Oceanside is a place where surfing nostalgia lives.

Contact freelance writer Andrew Phelps at ap@andrewphelps.com.