Hey Swaylocks, happy Frye day! I am a longtime reader, first time poster. I recently came up on this old 7’9" Skip Frye that someone had rotting away in their basement. It’s is pretty beat up, but strait as an arrow. I sealed up any open wounds and it’s water tight and ready to surf again! I’m stoked.
I am hoping someone might have some info about when and where this board was made. There are no markings anywhere on the board except for the logos, so all we have to go off is the shape. From the research I’ve done (based on the length and round tail), I place it around 69 or maybe early 70’s. But I wasn’t around back then, so what the heck do I know? Any information you have to share is greatly appreciated.
(FYI - I am not planning to sell this board and retire, just want to understand a little more about it’s history and the era it came from.)
I think it is more likely to be a 90’s Frye. The board is too small to be from 69 with how refined the shape is, plus a clear lame like that would be worse off than that unless it was never ridden which is clearly not the case for the board in question.
Probably not '69&'70 , but not as late as the '90’s either. He has shaped this type of board throughout his illustrious career. Things didn’t start to go sub 7’0 short until after '71 and thru the '80’s. 7’9 was coincidental. Probably was meant to be a 7’10". Which would be a very “norm” length for a board of this type in the early '70’s.
PS. The ”Ply" fin was for sure an add-on. I lived a block up the street from Frye’s “garage” and Select Surf Shop in '69 and '70. I absolutely never saw a Ply Glass-on on anything back then. Lowel
1969-70 sounds about right, to me. The fin does not look original. Also curious about what appears to be a leash plug, but it looks odd. If the board is from the years mentioned that was added later.
Maybe it’s how the photos show on my end but they lookin like they have long flat spots through the curved section of the nose and they aren’t the same curve either.
It would be passable on a backyard board or very early board but not something one would expect to see on a pro level highly sought after builder.
I’m looking at it on my phone. So maybe that’s not really the case if you see different on your end.
My two cents…Late 70s…Skip had a room behind my little store in PB. Select Surf Shop and Tugs same building. The wooden fin a Gebhart bought at Mitches, Backyard glass job maybe Brad and George Bubin. Leash loop normal for era. Skip started running out of laminates and started outling them around that time. Pretty normal PB point board for the times. Odd size numbers was pretty normal to trying to be cool…,Has anybody looked at the Swaylocks home page? It is a add for a Chinese college or something?
Thanks for everyone that chimed in. It looks like ‘ace’ was right on the money.
I reached out to Bird and this is what he told me:
“This board was built between 1974-1977. Skip was living and shaping in this little shack behind Select Surf Shop which I was managing. The board Model came to be called a Thinman. At that time Skip was into light and flexy boards. Larry Gephart was making the keel fins for all of out Fish’s so I had him make some single fins using Skips traditional 8” template which was normally placed 8"s up from the tail of the board. At that time Skip was charging $25.00 and a six pack for a shape job. Most boards were Ghetto Glassed meaning done in an alley or someones family garage. Most of these models were glassed with single layers of cloth both top and bottom to keep them light and increase the flex. As a result the breakage rate was around 75%. If your board is at or close to 7’7" in length I’d say that it was shaped for Jeff Taich who also would have glassed it."
‘‘Bird is the word.’’ The reason I called out the year as 1969, is because the board could have been a 1969 Surf Systems model, called the DART. That round tail is sooooo 1969. A number of the designs I developed @ Surf Systems, as I reflect back on them, were well ahead of their time. The DART, was not one of them. Many of the designs I created then, crowding some fifty years old now, are still hailed today as breakout performers.
