SHAPER

Lee in the bay. Photo: c/o SW

Lee Stacey stood at a strange old fork in the road. To the left lay life as the frontman for a hardcore metal band. To the right, a career as a surfboard shaper. The tour bus or the shaping bay? Horn hands or shakas? The choice, it turns out, was made for him.

“I was in a band called I Killed The Prom Queen. They went a long way,” he ponders today, laughing. “Unfortunately they went a long way without me! I wanted to shape boards and they wanted to tour. I turned up one day to band practise and it was like, ‘Umm, Lee, we don’t really need you to turn up anymore.’ But shaping is what I’ve always wanted to do, that’s my creative outlet, that’s what keeps me awake at night.”

Growing up in South Australia, Lee started out in the Power Plug factory, cleaning toilets and sweeping the floors of foam dust in return for cheap boards. “Then when I was 17 I did what everyone else in South Oz does and moved to the Gold Coast.” After doorknocking for a gig, Lee got his start at Nev Hyman’s factory. “The manager there was a guy named Daryl Bulger, a classic guy. He taught me how to glass and he taught me how to hand shape and was a full mentor for me. Funny guy – a vegetarian who spent three months of the year hunting wild boar in the outback.”

Lee learned quickly, and was only 21 when he shaped the first board under his own label. He picked it up, surveyed the rail line in a shaft of late afternoon light, and felt a low voltage surge of pride through his fingertips. He soon after moved his young family to Sydney’s northern beaches and struck out on his own. In the years since he’s earned a reputation as one of the most progressive and technical young shapers in the game, crafting boards for Ace Buchan, the Hobgoods, Dean Morrison and Dusty Payne amongst others. As Bob Hurley states, “Lee is a young guy who understands the modern world and the modern surfer.”

“I love watching something I’ve created being ridden,” says Lee, “listening to the guys who’ve ridden it and thinking about where that board goes next. It makes you feel like you’re learning something new every day, and it makes you feel like you’re never going to run out of things to learn. No board will ever be the same as the last, just like the waves we ride.”

Written by Sean Doherty