Some History and the Story

Miki Langenbach bio

My educational background is in engineering and mathematics but a fascination for sailboarding kept me away from a "normal" life with a 9 to 5 job and a big superannuation.

Instead I traveled the world, looking for fun, wind and waves. After many years of collecting valuable experiences I settled down in Germany as part of the growing sailboard industry. I have built hundreds of sailboards, from shaping to polishing, the standard conventional way and any avenue of high tech composite. Parallel to my life as a shaper I operated an import - export business, mainly supplying the surfboard and sailboard industry in Europe. Getting older I started to get smarter (it is bloody hard work to shape those 8' to 10' up to 5" thick monsters) and, in 1984, built my first profiler, kind of a copy of what my mate in Sydney showed me.

This profiler was different to most others as it used a planer to cut, my first "stress free" blank holding mechanism and a very effective dust extraction. Now I could reproduce accurate curves and improve my surfboards but the profiler was also used to supply half of Europe with "preshapes". My era as a "preshaper" had begun.

In 1993 my first "Pantograph" pumped out surfboards. A love-hate relationship was born. Pantographs suffer all the problems of any shaping machine and some more. As there is no "perfect" original, there is always a worse copy in an even more inaccurate blank. With a production of over 10 000 surfboards per year, maintenance became a burden. With Murphy's law on the wall I started the maintenance war, declaring victory in 1997/1998. Now I had a machine that needed a drop of oil now and then and new brushes from time to time, capable of 12 surfboards per hour. But it had been a tough war with many lessons to be learned. Shaping machines mean heat, dust, vibration, enormous cutting forces and, you guessed it, more dust.

Parallel to this venture I started to go digital. Computer controlled shaping of individual custom surfboards was our aim; I had to get out of the dust, heat and noise. A little air-conditioned control room was my goal.

I did not see the "machine" as a big problem, the software was the key. So we started of with a letter to Ian Pierce but he made it only up to Byron Bay. He never arrived at the Gold Coast. Back to CAD programs, laser and touch scanning, surface modeling programs and so on. Nix gut. One day my friend in Sydney rang me and told me about a program he had found on the internet. This was more to my liking, the basics looked good. We invited the programmer over to Australia, outlined our idea and signed a contract. Things started rolling. We had a machine in the making and a program in the making. In March 2000 the machine was ready to roll but the program needed still a lot of work. Things started dragging, mysterious things happened and in 2001 the programmer forgot about the contract. We were back to square one but we had a bag full of experience and a fully working machine. Now we knew exactly what we wanted but not yet how to get it. Back to scanning, discussions with CAD companies, quotes from software developers and so on and yes, many of these things made surfboards but the control was not in the hands of the shaper and the results did not satisfy the critical eye of the shapers.

In 2001 the heaven opened and by chance Jimmy and Ralph joined us. Jimmy and Ralph made it possible that I could dream what I wanted and the next day it was programmed reality. At the beginning of 2003 I was finally able to design and machine surfboards. Still with little limitations but in July 2003 all this was history. Finally I could do what I wanted, design a surfboard like a shaper without special computer skills, tweak the surfboard a bit here and there, position the design on screen into the blank of choice and press the button. With this development the machine had blanks to work and grew from strength to strength. In July 2003 I made 20 surfboards on the APS3000, in August 2003 I made 50 surfboards, half a year later I started the machine had a history of over 4000 surfboards. Not bad for a little single cutter machine originally designed as a shapers tool to make a few surfboards a day. And yes, she can make stingers, wingers, pintails, concaves, perfect transitions, noses to a point, cut the stringer clean and much more. Maintenance?? A drop of oil now and then and new brushes from time to time. Over the years I perfected my "stress free" blank holding system and invented a revolutionary cutting system. You will love her as I do. By the way, I now use brushless servo's... . And did I mention that all 4000 surfboards were individual custom designs?

The Future? The APS 3000 is an open design that can incorporate whatever will come. First I will try to cut even cleaner at the same process speed, channels are still a challenge and we will see what 64 bit processors can do better. See you there ...

Jimmy Freese bio

My sister, my buddy Tom Noel and I went down to the Gold Coast, Australia on in May 2001 vacation to check out Oz and score some waves like this one at Burleigh (surfer unidentified).

On the flight down I read an article in TransWorld Surf in which talked about Miki's machine. I went and talked to the boys and they explained what they had going on. Things became real clear when I was shown a surfboard that came out of the machine. At that point I knew, Miki's machine was far more advanced than anything else at the time. They had mentioned that they had needed some help with the software side of the project. I said ok, let's make it happen.

I then contacted my dad, because he is a world class computer programmer and math squid and we assessed the difficulty of the software side. We decided it could be done.

So I went back to Hawaii, but then a month and a half later, I was living on the Gold Coast working on the software. My dad stayed in Hawaii but we worked closely with Miki making sure the software talked to the machine's controller correctly. We also worked closely with the shapers making sure the software gave them all the tools they needed and was intuitive from their perspective.

Ralph Freese bio

As mentioned Ralph was brought in by his son Jimmy and has stayed stoked the whole time. While Jimmy was living on the Gold Coast he was able to make a trip down here to check out the action first hand. Currently he's living in beautiful Kailua on Oahu continuing to work hard on the APS3000 program while still working on mathematical proofs and theorems at the University of Hawaii.