WHATS THE PROBLEM?
Wax sticks to a board when it's cold. Warm it up in the sun and the bonds holding the wax together start to break down. That's why every wax removal method, from a plastic comb to an old credit card, starts the same way: leave the board in the sun for fifteen minutes and let the wax soften. Skip that step and a conventional scrapers don't cut the wax, they plows it, smearing a layer back onto the board instead of cutting through it.
To add to the struggle, surfboards aren't flat and after enough sessions, every board picks up pressure dings. A rigid wax scraper can't follow any of that. It rides straight across a curved, dented surface, missing wax in every low spot, forcing pass after pass that still doesn't finish the job.
The original inspiration for Trace came from an old credit card. They have the flexibility to contour into a dinged deck the way nothing designed for the job could, but it still needs the wax to be soft to work, and had to be thrown away after just one use.
VERSION ONE: ENGINEERING THE FLEX
The first idea of Trace was to make a flexible metal card that was the same size as a credit card so it could be a travel friendly.
I knew that metal was what I needed to start with, because every surf shop that I had talked to said they used either a dulled paint scraper or spacking knife. You had to know how to dull the blade to use it, and it could only work on flat decks, but it was the only material that could cut cold wax, and when you're dealing with used boards every day you can't wait around for the sun to soften the wax. The question was, what metal, and how thick or thin did it have to be to be malleable while staying flat. Material properties and the thickness of the metal are closely correlated in determining how the metal will react when its put into action, so rather than trying dozens of combinations of materials and thicknesses I honed in on the material first.
The exact metal had to have exceptional elastic memory to help maintain its shape after being deformed while also being corrosion resistant to stop the metal from rusting if it was left outside with salt covered wax on it. A certain stainless steel alloy suits these requirements perfectly: 301 stainless steel alloy. It's used extensively in aerospace and industrial applications as the material choice for springs that need high strength, elasticity, and lightweight durability while lasting millions of cycles. It was the perfect foundation to build Trace from.
Finding the right thickness was all about testing. How the scraper felt in your hand came entirely down to an inexplicable feeling of intuitive utility. It's not something that could be calculated from a simulation, so I started buying sheet metal to test my theories. I started with 1/8", which as it turns out, is a lot of metal. I had borrowed a friends metal shears and couldn't make a scratch while trying to cut it. So I tried 1/16", and ran into the same thing. It wasn't until I got to 0.015", about the thickness of a blade of grass, that I could I start cutting out the profile of I had been thinking about. At 0.015" thick, it was the first design that actually worked. I cleaned up the edges on a belt grinder so I wouldn't cut myself and rounded over the edges to make sure it wouldn't scratch a board. It was stiff, but it cut through cold wax, and with some elbow grease it could be used to get into dings. I had found the upper limit to the thickness. Then I found that below 0.005", the thickness of a piece of paper, the scraper was too easy to bend. It couldn't hold its shape and would permanently deform after a few uses . With my limits identified, I made 6 scrapers with identical profiles at varying thicknesses. I started asking every person that would entertain me what felt right to them. How did it feel to hold it and just flex it in your hand. How did it feel to actually take wax off of a board. Some people liked the thickest version, but almost everyone else unanimously picked 0.012" thick.
It was just the right blend of flexible that pushed back, giving a tactile feeling, without the sensation that it would fold in your hand. It had every feature I set out to include, the rounded edge was board safe and cut cleanly through cold wax while being perfect for dings and the rail. Except there was one issue. Sheet metal that thin won't cut skin, but when you're putting pressure down into a board, that equivalent pressure goes back into the palm of your hand, digging into it like a butter knife. It was something I'd be okay handing out to friends, but the idea of the project had grown. I felt like I really had something, I just needed to make it comfortable to use.
VERSION TWO: THE HANDLE
So how do you pivot a design? Do you scrap the entire thing and start over? Or do you add to it, creating complexity that you didn't originally plan for. The tricky thing with coming up with something new is that there's no how-to on what to do next. The trick to it is to be honest about what matters. Do people really need a wax scraper that can go in their wallet? I know I don't. I'm not in a parking lot somewhere with boards in my car that need to be cleaned that very moment and frustrated that I don't have a wax scraper with me. Cleaning a board is a conscious decision. I'm at home and I want to put a board up for sale on a Sunday so I put it onto my to do list to give it a beautification makeover by taking the wax off and doing a quick clean to make sure it sells for an extra $50. That means I can leave the wax scraper in my garage.
Knowing that, I decided to add to the design by first enlarging the profile. This gave me a few benefits, firstly, it increased the length of the cutting edge, making the scraper more effective at cleaning a large surface area quickly. Secondly, and most importantly, it made room to secure a handle to the scraper that would sit comfortably in the palm of a hand. Inspired by the already established design of dough cutters, I thought it would be simple to use epoxy to secure some walnut scales (slabs of material used to make handles for knives and cutters) to the tang (metal blade component) and the design would work right away after a little bit of sanding and forming. And it did, the scraper sat comfortably enough in the hand, solving the pain point, but it also created another problem.
The wooden handle was rigid. At the time I used two 1/8" thick scales for the handle attached with only epoxy. The scraper worked just fine with downward pressure, the blade flexed allowing a constant pressure on the board. But for me the real reason I liked to use an old credit card was because it could be flexed and used in dings or along the rails. When I applied pressure on the side of the scraper to get it to flex in the other direction, the epoxy bond couldn't withstand the stress at the corners of the handle. So it split. Every single one of them. I tried different kinds of woods like oak, maple, and teak (my goodness teak is expensive) hoping they might bond better to the the metal. I tried composites like micarta, G10, and carbon fiber hoping their unique structural properties would help withstand the bending stresses. I tried thickening the handles from 1/4" to 1/2" to 3/4" to see if I just wasn't putting enough material into the handle. The epoxy failed me every time.
I spent months floating between ideas. During my breaks at work I would wander around the machine shop looking for the slightest inclination of inspiration. At one point I saw a box of adjustable wrenches with red plastic handles that have those small nipples on the end of the handle that comes from the run off of the plastisol. As it turns out, plastisol doesn't work well on sheet metal that's 3 pieces of paper thick. A week after that, I realized my solution had to be rolling the metal into a handle to copy another design of dough cutters. It was too flimsy and made the flex of the scraper unintuitive. Again, the thickness of the metal I had spent months before prototyping to be my perfect wax remover was biting me in the ass . I felt I had sunk so much already into it that I couldn't scrap the idea, it worked too well and I knew there was something I was missing.
VERSION THREE: THE CHANNEL
If you can't add to a design, and pivoting isn't an option, what if you could take something away? Did I need ALL of the metal on the blade? Of course not, the edge of the blade does the majority of the work, the rest of the metal is the vehicle that allows the blade to trace the outline of the board. So why not separate the rigid portion from the rest of the blade, allowing it to move freely, the way it was originally designed to do. While at work one day, I took the pair metal shears that I used to cut the rough outline of the tangs, and made two cuts into the blade. I grabbed a board sitting in my car from my morning session, and after one pass, I knew I had it.
The cut outs gave the perfect amount to allow you to manipulate the blade while the elasticity of the stainless steel made sure the blade kept its shape. While the blade become malleable, the tang sandwiched between the scales acted as a rigid foundation for the forces to dissipate through, reducing the force directed into the epoxy joint at a single point. What was happening was that the focal point of the forces was shifted from the highest point of leverage at the edge, closer to the main axis of rotation at the center of the handle. Torque around an axis is linear, so adding .625" deep channels to a 2" lever arm, it reduces the torque by about a third while also creating a counter lever on the opposite side of the focal point that help offsets the bending force. The epoxy joint and the metal were working together, not fighting against one another.
The result was a wax scraper design that did everything I wanted it to. It blended the control of a blade that could do bend anyway I needed it to with heft that only comes from quality tools. That's why I made Trace. To make a quality tool that makes wax removal a non issue.
I knew I wanted to share Trace with the surfing community, and from that, another problem came up. How do you make hundreds, or even thousands of these? Subscribe to our email list to be the first to read the upcoming story of making Trace manufacture ready!