In a garage somewhere in Oregon sits a big hunk of cedar, pulled from beneath the surface of a river and now awaiting its next incarnation. Once it completely dries, it will only get wet again, this time slicing through the waves off Strathmere, N.J.

In between, that piece of reclaimed wood will spend several months in the East Falls workshop of Richard Allison, a furniture designer and admittedly so-so surfer, who is himself testing the waves in a new line of work - shaping surfboards, specifically hollow wooden longboards, distant relatives of the old-school boards lugged into the Pacific by California surfers back in the 1940s and '50s.

Allison, 42, is half of Rayskin Hollow Longboards, makers of custom, handmade surfboards promoted as "the Bentley of the sea." Charles Barrett, 40, is the other half. A graphic and industrial designer who usually makes Web sites and T-shirts, Barrett creates the intricate designs that decorate the exterior of the boards, giving them a distinctive look and a distinctive price tag - in the $13,000 to $15,000 range. Although Barrett and Allison aren't serious surfers, their customers are. Or, in the case of the guy in California who ordered two boards to be installed in his oceanfront house, seriously wealthy.

"Every one of them does touch the water. They get surfed before they ever get shipped," Barrett said, lest anyone think Rayskin is just about making luxury toys or objets d'art. They have sold five boards - the first in July 2007 - since finishing the original prototype in September, and now have several in production, including a new design that features an octopus with eyes made of inlaid mother-of-pearl, its tentacles wrapping around the board in elegant curlicues.

Rayskin began, as a lot of businesses do, with one of those tell-me-if-I'm-crazy kind of moments, in 2006, after Allison read an article in the New York Times about the abrupt closure of Clark Foam, which had been the world's largest supplier of the polyurethane blanks used to make most conventional surfboards. The company, which at one time manufactured 90 percent of the blanks used to make surfboards in the U.S., cited harassment by the state of California and the Environmental Protection Agency. Dec. 2, 2005, the day the plant closed, became known as "Blank Monday," and the surfing world was left searching for new methods of making boards.

The closure narrowed the choices among foam-board shapers but also created opportunities for new - or in this case, old - methods of board construction. Some shapers are returning to the classic dimensions of a longboard but are working in synthetics, while others are working in balsa and bamboo, and, like Allison, looking for the "greenest" options.

"I got this cryptic e-mail from Ric that just said, 'I have this idea for a surfboard,' " Barrett said. The end product of that conversation was a little more than nine feet long and weighed nearly 40 pounds, made of the same kind of spruce as a Gibson acoustic guitar. Inside, planks of spruce, laser-cut into a honeycomb pattern, made up the board's skeleton.

"I knew a lot about wood, I knew a lot about design, I just didn't really know much about surfboards," Allison said.

While on a recent trip to California, Allison called on a friend of a friend and finagled himself an invitation to the studio of Terry Martin, a legend who has hand-shaped thousands of boards working for Hobie. Martin convened a group of longtime surfers and board shapers, including 70-year-old Mickey Munoz (dubbed "Quasimodo" for his distinctive hunched-over stance), at his place in Capistrano Beach. Allison arrived with two boards - the original prototype and the octopus - and an open mind.

The older guys had plenty to share and recommended sharpening the point of the board's nose a bit. "The original one looked more like a paddle board; this would make more of a surfboard shape," Martin said. With input from test-riders and with the counsel of the old-school guys in California, Rayskin's new prototype is nearly 10 pounds lighter and has a more pronounced nose point.

Martin, now 70, made his first board in 1953 because he was a skinny teenager unable to carry the 100-pound-plus boards the older guys had. "The thinking was, if you weren't man enough to carry your board down to the beach, then you shouldn't be surfing," Martin said.

While some board shapers in California are making wooden longboards, the wood is usually balsa and the interior more crudely designed, Martin said.

For Allison, whose custom furniture pieces live in private homes, his work with Rayskin has been a gratifying way to share his art and his talent. "You can make a chair, and maybe over the course of a year, a few people will sit in it, but this is something you can really use. Everybody can use it; it's out there in public," he said.

Munoz, surfing sage that he is, put it this way: "Surfboards are made to ride - riding is an art."