The Team
Beastmaker formed out of the ether in Sheffield UK. We should warn you that if you buy a board from us, you are directly helping an active part of the UK climbing scene both outdoors and in.
We are, at heart, essentially keen climbers who wanted to train our finger strength more efficiently. In first year at university time was short for training, at the same time Ned and Dan were becoming obsessed with splitting the fingers up, isolating them and training them independently. Initial gains were great (if a little hasty sometimes leading to tweaks). Resin fingerboards were too rough for our 1hr30min sessions and blood blisters were common on one arm deadhangs. As a result the first "beastmaker" was shaped in 2007 and whilst being far from perfect it got sanded and altered over the next 6 months until it became a joy to train on.
The difference was genuinely remarkable, and training when getting in from a short but rough gritstone session was possible. Word began to get around and, after initially making a few for friends of ours, we fired down to Leicester where Ned grew up to meet childhood friend David Bowering along with Elsie Butler to work on an even better quality solution. CAD CAM (computer aided design, computer aided manufacture) was the idea and over the next 3 months Dave went all dexter and made a ridiculously dangerous but impressive CNC from scratch with the odd donor part from an old A level project machine.
The lack of safety guards around it and the ridiculous spray arcs of sawdust lead Dave and Elsie to soon create a better machine which took another 8 months of design and manufacture. This machine is still in use today but as demand has risen we now have a team of CNCs working hard to meet demand.
The beastmaker design has been tinkered and tailored for over 2 years since we hand made the first one. It looks like it does, not because it is supposed to look quirky or cool or different from other fingerboards, but because it is the most efficient layout of holds in the given unit of area to ergonomically increase finger strength (only bettered if you put 2 next to each other side by side for ultra wide gripping). We made it to train on and to train hard. If you purchase one of these then it should become obvious that what you have is a road map to increased finger strength, not just a block of wood with any old pocket fired into it because it looks nice or different.
For example; the bottom rung is the smallest we wanted to make it before skin started to really hurt after a long session. Weakening your dermatological layers is not the greatest idea if you want to climb hard outside the day after a training session. And as of yet there are very few people on the planet who can complete a full set of crimped repeaters (6 reps of 7 second hangs) on one arm on them. Things like the Micros help cover the boards lack of tiny edges as the importance of a bent pinky on tiny crimps has really influenced/weighted the usefulness of sub 10mm edges since the boards were designed
In the last decade we've been lucky to see the beastmaker become the international standard for fingerboards. It can be used as a reference point to check in or on a day in day out training aid. They've helped hundreds of thousands of climbers work towards their goals. From dreams like soloing El cap, or getting into the olympics all the way down to doing ones first pullup or pb outside. Good training tools are a clear example of marginal gains adding up to major achievements.