The Design Behind Trace

DESIGNING A BETTER WAX SCRAPER

WHATS THE PROBLEM?

Surfboards aren't flat. Decks are convex, 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.

Wax also bonds to a board when it's cold. Warm it up in the sun and the molecular 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 scraper doesn't cut the wax, it plows it, smearing a layer back onto the board instead of lifting it off. 

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, yet it needs the wax to be soft to work and had to be thrown away after just one use. Those were the seeds of Trace: a flexible tool that can cut through cold wax

Version one: engineering the flex

The first version of Trace was a metal card, sized and shaped to slide into a wallet. A reusable, travel-friendly answer to the old credit card.

Metal was the first choice for the base material, as plastics were already shown to lack the ability to maintain an edge that cut through the bond between a board and wax. The exact metal had to have exceptional elastic memory to help maintain its shape after being flexed while also being corrosion resistant to stop the metal from rusting. A specific stainless steel alloy suits this requirement perfectly, and became the immediate choice for the metal: 301 stainless steel alloy. Used extensively in aerospace and industrial applications requiring high tensile strength, elasticity, and lightweight durability, it became the perfect foundation to build Trace from.

Once the material was selected, getting the flex and feel right took three months and 25 variations. The challenge was in finding the right thickness and profile. Err on the thin side, and the blade flexed easily and cut through the wax like butter but could be permanently deformed instead of springing back. Too thick, and it barely flexed while pushing the wax like a conventional wax scraper. The right answer sat in a narrow window between those two failure modes, and finding it meant testing thickness after thickness until one held its shape through real, repeated use, while being capable of a rounded edge that cut through the wax.

It worked exactly as intended. Cold wax, dings, rails. The card handled all of it, cutting cleanup time to under a minute without any prep in the sun. But every tester said some version of the same thing: it hurt to use. The thin edge dug straight into the palm. Ultimately, it worked, but that didn't matter. It still wasn't good enough.

Version two: the handle

Solving the pain meant giving up on the wallet-sized card. Nobody actually needed Trace to fit in a wallet anyway. Most people clean their boards on a Sunday in the garage, not on the go. That freed the design to grow, and a handle became possible.

What followed was fifteen prototypes across carbon fiber, G10, micarta, oak, and teak before walnut won out for its beautiful finish and manufacturability. An early 0.25" handle gave way to 0.5" once testers held both side by side and reached for the thicker one every time. It simply felt more substantial. Then came the problem that nearly ended Trace.

The wood handle was rigid. The blade was designed to flex. Every time someone used it, that flex put stress exactly where the two materials met: the epoxy bond. It peeled, starting at the corners of the handle, opening a hairline gap between wood and steel after only a handful of uses.

For months, there was no fix. Just a slow, demoralizing search. A plastisol-molded handle got tested and quickly dropped. Complex handle designs that required an unfeasible industrial jig setup. Old ideas got revisited and dropped again. Progress meant showing up for one more attempt with no guarantee any of them would work.

Final version: the channel 

Looking at a split handle, at the exact spot where the separation always started, one thing became obvious: the rigid handle and the flexing blade were fighting each other right at their connection point, and all of that stress had nowhere to go but into the epoxy joint.

So, on a whim, using a pair of metal shears, two small channels were cut into the blade, right where the handle was attached.

The logic was simple once it was visible: stop asking one solid piece of metal to be rigid at the handle and flexible everywhere else. Separate the two zones with a channel, and the blade bends freely without transmitting force into the epoxy joint. It worked immediately. The channel design, paired with rivets for durability and manufacturability with registration, became Trace's final form.

Trace exists so nobody has to bake their board in the sun before scraping it. Nobody has to fight a sock full of flour and a mess, or settle for an old credit card because commercial scrapers can't do the job. Cold wax, old wax, doesn't matter. It comes off clean, in under a minute.