We Make them to use with your fingers.
It all began with a Tec Deck, and a baseball glove but I have never had a drivers licence. So I stopped putting wheels on the bottom of my decks My second favorite band is the Beastie Boys, I live in Australia, So I thought fingerboards without wheels, snowboards and surfboards Adam Yauch came to Australia and went snowboarding I was learning to surf near Sydney when we moved to Victoria My favorite magazine is Monster Children. I now live near the Murray River.I thought you need something to carry around your finger board. I used to collect baseballs, then basketballs, Horween tan the leather for the NBA basketballs and NFL footballs I think leather makes better grip than sandpaper.The Murray river redgum is a beautiful eucalyptus tree. So I work with two types of leather and one type of wood, my favorite honey is Tasmanian leatherwood.
So we moved to Swan Hill and my wife got me a cruiser board from the bike shop down the road for my birthday, I designed the first fish shaped finger board, I bought trucks and wheels from America, the dollar was good back then and postage was a lot cheaper.
I get my American Horween leather from a guy in Canada… OA leather, he and his sister are great. I get my Redgum from a guy up the road… Arbuthnot sawmills, the guy there is great, he plays tennis and I bought my first batch of ply from the back of his car at a nearby tennis club.
I did the original batch of 1000 fishfingerboards for an art instilation. they were stuck between two huge pieces of glass mounted on some redgum, It looked like a shower screen, probably will be one day.
So we started with the fish shape because our family name is Whiting and I liked the idea of it looking like a cross section of a wing and I tried to make it look like a fish from the top and the side, I moved onto the snowboards because I got a gator press from the USA and liked how if you made them big, they kinda look better, and the surfboards just came as a natural expression of my youth and lost dreams. I like making the different eras of surfboard shapes and the different snowboard sizes, but there seems to be a standard surfboard size and a standard snowboard shape. I dont make many actual fishfingerboards anymore, I have about 200 still sitting around. The luggage is my main interest at the moment, Dying the leather, embossing and working out how to work with different sizes. My favorite is the A6 travel log holder that I am calling the dogfish for my daughter.