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The Meaning, the History, the Legend... Deep in the chests of all urbanised, office working, latte drinking, mod-con loving men and women beat the hearts of primal animals. Every cell, every neuron and every gene in our bodies has a direct link to an ancestry that was once cave dwelling, mammoth hunting and primitive. Though we may pretend otherwise our instincts, creativity, thoughts and actions all have a basis in this dark, distant remembered past. Today our basic needs and desires, though blanketed under the facade and softness of a modern world, are essentially the same as they were when we first descended from the trees, learnt to use tools and discovered we could control fire. We all have a biological and spiritual connection to a time when humans were barely socialised and not much more than upright apes. Thus a "Shaved Ape" is a modern human that acknowledges their link to a primal past and believes that our caves and clothing have changed but deep down we are just apes with better presentation. |
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The History of ShavedApe - Where did it all begin? Originally registered as a business called "ShavedApe
Skimboards" it was to be our grandiose method to make billions of
dollars... unfortunately for us this didn't happen. The name ShavedApe
was born during a brainstorming session, a very bizarre brainstorming
session to say the least. Skimboarding (see Brad's Web Page for links)
is a much underrated sport it will definitely gain in popularity as our
beaches are perfect for it. The best beach is fairly level with hard
packed, fine sand so that water stays on it for the longest possible
time. We basically taught ourselves to ride them and made our own
backyard boards (marine ply, pointy front, blunt rear). We had so many
people asking us where we got them that we thought "What the hell, let's
make them and see if we can sell any." We registered the business
name and started testing and designing. We tried marine ply (expensive),
standard ply with marine varnish (cheaper but the marine varnish wears
down pretty quickly), acrylic (weighed a ton and was dangerous as hell)
and found that the best way was to use two peices of thinner ply glued
together with weights in the middle to give the most some "lift".
Problem was that we all had full time jobs and "manufacturing" was just
too costly and too time consuming (took the best part of a day to make
one board). So we contacted woodwork shops, toy makers, a plastic
injection moulding company (expensive to set up the moulds but cheap
after that, if you want thousands of them...) and tried various other
ways to get them made until we finally discovered that as a small time
operation we just couldn't make it work. One of the most
complicated problems was insurance. For example we had problems with
getting public liability insurance to cover us in case somebody jumped
on one of our boards and broke their neck. We still believe
that if we had some backing (ie money) and could get them into surf
shops on consignment then they would take off.
Matt
and
Ash on behalf of
Ashman
taking a dive (slightly doctored by Hexter)
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