DANA POINT, Calif. — Sculptors have an ability to see a work of art hidden inside an amorphous block of stone. Terry Martin has that X-ray vision. Only his medium is rigid foam, and inside each slab is a surfboard waiting to be liberated.

On this day, Martin is studying a rectangle of polyurethane in his Dana Point workshop. It's a cramped closet redolent of resin, with deep-blue walls and slits of fluorescent light that cast the white foam in sharp relief.

"I like to sneak up on it like a detective," Martin said. He grabs a dull handsaw he has owned since 1963 and starts cutting. "People don't understand what goes into a making a surfboard. It's not something that can just be pumped out of a machine. Where's the soul in that?"

Martin, 69, is making a 9-foot-6-inch longboard. He puts on protective earphones and fires up an electric planer that's as heavy as a dumbbell, a Skil 100 model favored by surfboard shapers that was discontinued long ago.

He glides along the block, his fingers adjusting the depth of the planer's blade with each pass, his sandal-clad feet performing a dance so that he is always applying the proper pressure. Then it's on to a series of ever-finer sheets of sandpaper and wire netting. Over the next hour, a surfboard takes form like a ship emerging from a foggy harbor.

Martin estimates he has hand-shaped more than 50,000 surfboards over the past 55 years. He is a legend in the tight-knit fraternity of the world's master shapers, men who learned their craft through long apprenticeships. He's also an endangered species.

The custom hand-shaped surfboard is a Southern California icon. But some fear the craft is fading as mass production and a flood of imports revolutionize surfboards in ways not seen since the 1950s, when polyurethane replaced wood as the primary building material.

A decade ago, an estimated 80 percent of surfboards sold in the U.S. were completely hand-shaped. Today, it's estimated that less than 20 percent are hewed by hand — some suspect far less.

"It's becoming a lost art," Martin said.

Surfing is steeped in tradition and the mystique of secret surf spots, once-in-a-lifetime waves and magic boards. A surfboard imbued with the touch of its shaper is the conduit between a rider and nature.

"The whole culture of surfing is based around the handmade board and the relationship between the surfer and the shaper," said Surfer's Journal publisher Steve Pezman. "The sport is losing a component of its charm."

Martin was 14 when he made his first board out of redwood and balsa salvaged from a San Diego lumberyard's scrap heap. The 10-foot-6-inch board was far lighter and more maneuverable than the heavy battleships most guys rode in 1952. Word got around, and Martin started making them in his father's garage.

In 1963, he begged Hobie Alter, Orange County's pioneering surf shop owner, to hire him as a shaper. Alter taught him how to work the Skil 100 in the same cramped workshop where Martin shapes boards today.

For decades, the surfboard business was dominated by hundreds of small and medium-size companies. But globalization is changing the industry.

In the 1990s, Santa Cruz-based Surftech made waves by going to Thailand to factory-produce a surfboard that was a sandwich of expanded polystyrene, PVC sheet foam, fiberglass and epoxy. The boards are lightweight and durable, but their plastic feel led traditionalists to deride them as soulless "pop-outs."

Eventually, many of surfing's legendary shapers warmed to the idea — and the money — and licensed their names and designs to Surftech. Other surfboard makers followed suit and moved overseas to take advantage of new materials and cheap labor.

Surfboard imports topped $29 million last year, more than four times the amount in 2004, when U.S. customs officials began counting. Nearly 30 percent of surfboards sold in the U.S. are made overseas — from sleek carbon fiber models to traditional foam boards hand-shaped by Chinese workers who have never seen an ocean.

"There will never be another Terry Martin in the United States," said Matt Biolos, co-founder of San Clemente-based Lost Enterprises. "That's not to say that there won't be one overseas."

Biolos, 37, is proud he was taught how to make surfboards the traditional way. His nom de guerre in the shaping bay is Mayhem. "I'm probably among the last generation of hand-shapers," he said, adding that finishing off a machine-cut board requires far less skill. "It's not very rewarding work."

Yet he is resigned to the fact that to keep up with competitors, hand-shaping will be consigned to nostalgic hobbyists and a few artisans.

"It'll be like losing a language. But that happens every day in the world, doesn't it?" he said. "In fact, the less of it that does exist, the more money it will mean for the guys who remain."

That certainly would be a change. Shapers have always suffered for their art. The hours are long, the pay lousy. They're exposed to toxic substances. It is physically demanding work, and even the best-known craftsmen pocket less than $100 a board.

"If I'm making $30,000, I'm having a good year. And I'm supposed to be at the top of my profession," said Midget Smith, a well-known San Clemente shaper who apprenticed under Martin as a teenager. "My 24-year-old daughter makes more managing a coffee shop."

A customer who was a mathematician loosely calculated that Martin has walked from California to New York and back again to about Milwaukee making all his boards. He still works nearly every day, supplementing his Social Security by mowing foam.

"I'm having as much fun as I had in 1963," Martin said. "I love my job. How many people can say that?"