In a workshop not far from the rhythmic breath of the Indian Ocean, Budi Hantoro carves silence into surfboards. There are no conveyor belts or digital screens in his shaping bay—only the hum of a planer, the sharp hiss of sandpaper, and the slow, deliberate rhythm of a man who believes that the soul of surfing is shaped, not stamped.

Budi didn’t set out to be Indonesia’s best surfboard shaper. In fact, he only picked up a board in 1994, lured by a friend’s casual invitation to try riding a wave. That first glide across the water ignited something in him. As his mastery of surfing grew, so too did his curiosity about the vessel beneath his feet. He wanted a board that truly fit him—so he decided to make it himself.

He didn’t have money for new gear, but he had his hands, and a head full of questions. He began experimenting on broken and second-hand longboards, whittling and sanding, reshaping them in quiet defiance of his inexperience. “I wanted to see if I could just do it myself,” he says now, with the wry smile of someone who knows exactly how bad those first boards were.

Eventually, Budi moved to Bali—not to chase waves, but to find work. Yet even there, between jobs, surfboards kept finding him. Friends called, word spread, and the orders rolled in. Soon, he was skipping shifts to keep up with shaping demands. “If I’m going to make it as a shaper,” he told himself, “I need to get out of here and gain more experience.”

He knew no one in the surfboard business. He called friends, hustled shapes, picked up odd jobs airbrushing, and shaped on weekends. It was all grit, all improvisation. But slowly, the boards got better. Surfers noticed. Opportunities followed.

“There’s little money in shaping,” Budi admits. “The only reason I could do it at a young age was the passion. The love of surfing.”

He hand-shaped over a thousand boards before touching a shaping machine. For him, handcrafting is not a romantic ideal but a rite of passage—a language of precision and feel that cannot be replicated by automation. “I don’t think there will ever be a top shaper who didn’t start by hand.”

Being a shaper from Bali, Budi says, comes with expectations—and assumptions. “People think I make great small boards, because I’m from Bali. But that’s not always true.”

What sets Budi apart is not where he’s from, but what he refuses to do. “I don’t want to shape boards I wouldn’t ride. I’ve shaped longboards, funboards, all of it. But I don’t want to shape another funboard for the rest of my life. China can have that market.”

His passion lies in performance shortboards, single fins, and big-wave guns—tools of commitment, designed to chase the best wave of your life. That’s the board Budi wants to make you.

In an industry increasingly dominated by machines and mass production, Budi Hantoro is a quiet craftsman, shaping not just boards, but the futures of the surfers who ride them. In the subtle sweep of a rail, the measured curve of a rocker, lives a man’s pursuit of precision, passion, and something far deeper than foam.

Because one great surfboard, after all, can change everything.