Made by a surfer who loves building things.

Hi — I'm a technical designer by trade. My day job is taking concepts and bringing them from the digital world into real, physical things, so I spend a lot of my time living in that gap between a screen and a workshop. I'm a maker and a tinkerer at heart: I'm always pulled toward a new project, a new material, or a new bit of tech to play with.

The other half of my life is the ocean. I surf, and somewhere along the way I fell hard for surfboard design — not just riding boards, but understanding why they ride the way they do. That curiosity turned into sawdust. I started designing and building my own hollow timber surfboards, and my daily driver right now is a 5'8" fish I made from Paulownia — light, lively, and a constant reminder of how good it feels to ride something you built with your own hands.

“There's nothing quite like paddling out on a board you drew, shaped and glassed yourself.”

Why I built OpenShaper

I wanted a design tool that fit the way I actually work — quick to open, honest about the numbers (volume and weight matter a lot when you're building in timber), and able to export clean geometry for templates and CNC. Naturally, testing out some vibe-coding with a surfboard CAD turned into a genuinely fun project. It became the tool I now reach for in my own board-design workflow.

OpenShaper is a from-scratch, modern rebuild in the spirit of the original open-source BoardCAD — rewritten to run entirely in your browser, with a live 3D preview and a clean export path. It stands on that project's shoulders, and like BoardCAD it's released under the GPL so it stays free and open.

What I believe about it

• Free, for everyone. No accounts, no tiers, no paywall — every feature is free, and it always will be.
• Yours, on your machine. There's no server. Your designs never leave your browser.
• Open by default. The full source lives on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 — fork it, learn from it, improve it.

If you like making things as much as I do, I hope it helps you build something you're proud to paddle out on. It's free and always will be — but if it earns a spot in your shaping bay, you can buy me a coffee to keep it growing. New to all this? Start with the surfboard design guide or read up on construction methods.