Unlock Your Creative Potential with Little Bay Boards and Trotec Laser

On June 17th, 2023, we had the pleasure of showing Trotec Laser how we’ve been making use of their amazing laser system in our woodshop. 

I’m Jason Thelen. I’m the founder of Little Bay Boards. Little Bay boards is an eco-friendly, all-natural, Hollow wooden paddle board company.

10 years ago my daughter asked me for a paddle board and I couldn’t afford to buy one so I started looking around and realized I could probably build one that would be basically a surfboard that would be kind of Savvy.  That’s basically the creation of Little Bay boards. I didn’t mean to do it.  It was an accident.  Everybody asked me about that board everywhere that we went.

A lot of our products end up being sold as gifts.  It’s really fun to be a part of the surprise gift giving process, especially when it’s a custom board that has incredible personalizations on it.  We recently made a paddle board that was a 60th birthday gift and we were able to engrave on the paddle all his nicknames in the handwriting of his children and his friends and his family.  That project almost made me cry because it was such a personalized gift.

We originally bought a laser from a different company. I spent about 28 days with it and sent it back, wasn’t satisfied with its performance. It didn’t do what they said that it was going to be able to do.

We were able to get the SP 3000 and it’s the 200 watt laser system. We used to hand cut our designs and that would be quite time consuming and hard on your wrists to cut with a razor blade.

The frames that go into our boards, I personally designed those frames, probably nine years ago. I cut them by hand. That was the option, you cut it by hand and as good of a carpenter as I am and after cutting 300 of them I could on a really good day with no interruptions and just really getting after, it took me about an hour and a half to cut my whole frame system for my board.  The laser can do two of them in seven minutes and it can do it over and over and over again precisely.

That really allows us to do a lot more detailed work that would not have been possible with the razor blade cutting.

Time is everything in a business. You know, it’s how many man hours going to each project that you know it’s where you make your bread and butter.

We decided to purchase a Trotec because we needed to get a laser up and running as soon as possible.

It just kept coming back to Trotec. Trotec, you know, they have the best of the best of the best.  Couldn’t find a reason not to go with them. That was what it came down to. If you want to build the best things you got to have the best tools.

The laser has allowed us to be able to experiment with a lot of different designs that are more complicated. We are able to do customizations like there’s no tomorrow. It’s just unlimited possibilities now that we have the laser.

I’m working on a board right now that is truly impossible without the Trotec. There’s nobody else that’ll be able to make this board because nobody else has what we have. As an artist you want to be able to imagine and you want to be able to create and your creativity can be greatly limited by your resources of how to do it. Being able to have that opened up a whole new gallery of how I can think about things that can be done.

The training process learning the Trotec laser system was super easy. We had the service techs come up and put our laser together for us. They got it up and running to perfection and then the next day they trained me in. I was trained in, honestly within a couple hours. I will never stop learning new stuff on how to use the laser but to be able to operate it in a couple hours was just so fantastic!

The lengths that they went to to ensure a timely delivery time and we were worried about everything and they’re like “don’t worry” it’s going to be here on that day and they were on time, a little bit early and literally the container showed up and it was 15 minutes and the installer was here and another half hour the second installer was here and I didn’t have a worry in the world.

Every day it is amazing to operate and the lenses stay so clean because it is designed really well.  I have not had to waste any time trying to get it to work. It just does the job it needs to do. It just works and that’s what we needed it to do. It’s been a dream to work with.

I can’t explain how vast our imagination got to be after we realized, you know, its ability is beyond what we can comprehend still at this moment. 

People like the paddle board and it’s a really good performing board. It may be beautiful but it was designed really really really well throughout the years. You know, to be a just all-arounder, goes everywhere, does everything that you want it to do.

If anyone is interested in purchasing a little Bay board you can learn more about us at littlebayboard.com or you can find us on Facebook or Instagram.