RealSurf Surfers' Forum

Got to thinking recently about mactavish being credited with inventing the shortboard
but some how i don't think shaping an 8 fter is really a short board just a shorter long board .
what do ya reckon?

Hey mate,

It has to be seen within the context of the time. Our "shortboard" ideal is, like say 6'2'. Back then the term was relative to the standard boards they were lugging around, 9-10ft'ers.

In a literal sense you're right, it should be "shor(er) board Revolution", but only with hindsight of the 40 years since in which a sub 7ft "short" board became "normal".

However, on a different level, Bob might modestly concede the influence of his buddies George and Chris from that era also. It was'nt as if he would have had a brilliant flash all of his own...

Josh
www.joshdowlingshape.com

In fairness, he does credit George for influencing his desire to lop a few feet off the logs.

But he doesn't shape on Saturdays.
(apart from that there's a complex of ripoffs over time that none of the "big players" admit to)

Nat Young riding a keel fin 8ft in 3/4 ft surf not considered big board back in the day.

now lets not get history mixed up with hype
question 1 did bob invent the v bottom . lets ask midget what he thinks
question 2 did bob cut the back of a mal prbly
question 3 did some recieve a lot more publicity than others? oh yes
& like no other'' greenoughs influence on fins was by far & away what lead us to were we are to day
how do i know i was there. along with many others who were not interested in exploiting what we had
just those interested in the allmighty dollar

huie wrote:now lets not get history mixed up with hype
question 1 did bob invent the v bottom . lets ask midget what he thinks
question 2 did bob cut the back of a mal prbly
question 3 did some recieve a lot more publicity than others? oh yes
& like no other'' greenoughs influence on fins was by far & away what lead us to were we are to day
how do i know i was there. along with many others who were not interested in exploiting what we had
just those interested in the allmighty dollar

Good calls Hui, great time to be surfing ideas coming out of every left field. Some made a publicity motza and others went quietly, Bob got financially dudded many times as did many of the other free thinkers as the rise to company dollars began.
question 4 did surfing benefit? yes.
Mactavish was one spoke in the wheel as it rolled IMO

Davros wrote:Was watching Crystal Vouyager the other night and the board of the day was Nat Young riding a keel fin 8ft in 3/4 ft surf not considered big board back in the day.

Thereafter 7' 11" were the go with big twangy "Greenough" fins that released at difficult moments but the ex malsters embraced them as the offerings of the expat "one true messiah" (superhippy mumbo jumbo an yeah man he is the real deal).

While Nat was living the high life in California for 10 months after his world contest victory, back home in Brookvale McTavish, Platt and a host of others were lopping length from the norm. Ted Spencer took things really short. I seem to remember Roger Jones riding 5-6ft boards at least a couple of years before any of this happened.

I read somwhere recently that SA saw another tri-fin board that inspired him to go and make the first thruster, pretty sure it was a guy riding a twinny with a slightly smaller reduced stabilizer fin in the tail, cant remember his name though....and if this is the case, cant help but feel the amount of cred that SA has got, is way too much for simply borrowing someone elses' idea but adding a bigger fin than he....I know SA is a great shaper and surfer but he does get alot of cred for the first tri-fin board, plus the Campbell bros were doin 3 finned bonzers before , werent they ??? But the comp results made sure the design was getting plenty of attention, and the fact that they went so much better than other current designs...good luck to him and it changed surfing, but just wonder if all the cred is goin to the right places sometimes....I know there is alot ofSA fans out there, not knocking him or his boards, he is a ledgend.....

seems like we are going thru our own mini-shortboard period again now, boards are goin shorter all the time and I'm getting 6'0" guys ordering 5'10's and 5'9's as their everyday board, its cool but interesting how things go round in cycles...people will probably go shorter for a few years and then go back to riding a board a few inches longer than they are tall I reckon....

Reckon single fins would ever make a trendy comeback even in city beach breaks?

Davros wrote:Reckon single fins would ever make a trendy comeback even in city beach breaks?

There's a goldmine of ancient boards stashed under eastern suburb mansions near the footings many of them would be almost ( barely ridden) pristine condition.
Dig well enough and you can follow the evolution of boards from dinosaur logs to SA thrusters IKYN.

pridmore wrote:cant help but feel the amount of cred that SA has got, is way too much for simply borrowing someone elses' idea but adding a bigger fin than he

well I guess you had to be there.

Frank Williams is the guy to whom you're referring -- Frank a good shaper and pretty good surfer, had a twin fin setup with a little keel fin in the middle.

Simon's three-fins were massively different to this. So different that most of the people who looked at 'em thought "what the Fcuk is THAT?" The fins, all of similar size, were set in almost exactly the standard setup of the modern thruster...but -- and I know this is hard to grasp, now we've all seen literally millions of 'em stream out of factories and shops worldwide -- at the time, they looked super radical, almost alien.

Simon, always a laid back sort of person, nevertheless believed in the setup so strongly that he took 'em all the way to the highest possible level of competition, rolling the dice in the same way MR did with the twinnie a few years earlier.

Even those early ones performed in a vastly superior fashion to any other craft in the water, so much so that by the time Simon had finished with Bells Beach, 80% of the world's top surfers were frantically begging for the thruster measurements and hounding their shapers to get on the case. Much as some people liked the twinnie, that never happened with it.

In my opinion -- and once again I only really have one 'cause I happened to be there -- any attempt to downgrade Simon's effort with that thing by saying he "simply borrowed someone else's idea" then somehow gained an unreasonable level of hype by winning the three biggest pro events on earth at the time, is not just silly, it's missing the point.

The fact is that surfboard designs never rely on one protean Genius; they're always the result of a lot of different stuff mixing and matching and sometimes coming together with tremendous effect. The urge to pin any of the big shifts in design on to one person, romantic and all too human as it is, inevitably wilts under the pressure of reality. It's one of the classic red herrings of design. I often wonder if that was in the back of Simon's mind when he chose not to patent the thruster setup, instead simply giving the idea away free to the surfing world at large. He always says it was just because he wanted to compete and surf and didn't have the patience for the legalities, but he knew as well as anyone that design ideas don't come from nowhere. Not even George's sacred fin.

Pridmore..
A little historical accurasy ( FWIW )
* Frank Williams was ghost shaping for Midget in the late 70's
* Midget was riding a fat wide stinger-fish single fin and spinning it out
on his backhand whilst surfing south Narra on his pre work surfs.
* Midget gets to work one morning and foils up a bonza style side fin and using only resin..no glass or rovings..tacks the fin on his backhand rail side..
* Frank, at the time was doing a lot of wing-diamond tail twinnys..checks what Midget was up to and decides to locate a similar shaped fin..but on the stringer
* Simon whilst waiting to pick up his blank order checks out Franks board in the showroom..goes back to the Energy factory and with Steve Zoeller glasses a twinny size fin on the tail....
PRESTO !

Just to add to the necessary historical accuracy;

cactus wrote:Pridmore..
...
* Simon whilst waiting to pick up his blank order checks out Franks board in the showroom..goes back to the Energy factory and with Steve Zoeller glasses a twinny size fin on the tail....
PRESTO !

And Simon placed that tri-fin arrangement on a template substantially inspired by Geoff McCoy's "no nose" Laser Zaps of the time.

Sounds like there are a few guys on here that might of really witnesed the short board revoultion .
I guess someone was always going to hack the back off one of those old mals but really a short board has got to be sub 7ft and and capable of short arcs . Ted spencers White knights qualify . i have heard that the narrabeen guys were riding really short twin fins around 68 or 69. Who are the shapers that really got behind the shortboard thing?
Don't really think simon fits in here just yet.

buzzy wrote:Just to add to the necessary historical accuracy;

cactus wrote:Pridmore..
...
* Simon whilst waiting to pick up his blank order checks out Franks board in the showroom..goes back to the Energy factory and with Steve Zoeller glasses a twinny size fin on the tail....
PRESTO !

And Simon placed that tri-fin arrangement on a template substantially inspired by Geoff McCoy's "no nose" Laser Zaps of the time.

well let's go the whole hog and explain that Simon had been making no-nose-type outlines for single fins for around a year prior to doing the Thruster. The no-nose -- ridden by lots of McCoy team riders, Mark Warren, Damien Hardman and Todd Ingham along with Cheyne for example -- was the precursor to the much more radical Lazor Zap, and outlived it; most modern hi-perf thrusters today would have been considered no-noses back then.

bradshaw wrote:Sounds like there are a few guys on here that might of really witnesed the short board revoultion .
I guess someone was always going to hack the back off one of those old mals but really a short board has got to be sub 7ft and and capable of short arcs . Ted spencers White knights qualify . i have heard that the narrabeen guys were riding really short twin fins around 68 or 69. Who are the shapers that really got behind the shortboard thing?
Don't really think simon fits in here just yet.

I heard Graeme Black and Tony Dempsey were riding 6'6"s at Snapper in 1965.