That’s funny, but not. My wife is in the books antiques and collectibles business, has been for years. We see this mentality a lot. Guys going through shelves of books, looking up ISBN’s on their i phones.
Mako mentions “If you look too eager there are people there who will run up the price on you on purpose with no intention of buying.” Those are the shills, they work for the auction houses, or are friends of. Their “job” is to drive the auction prices up. Even on ebay you will find the same concept, here locally several sellers group together and agree to bid on each other’s items, to drive the bids up. Some even bid on their own stuff for the same purpose, although if ebay catches you, they will cut your account off.
My wife won’t have any part of that stuff. One dealer contacted her to help sell off (ebay) his warehouse full of stuff because he said she was the only dealer he trusted - then he got hurt when she caught him bidding on his own stuff, and bailed on the whole thing.
The TV shows like Antiques Roadshow, and the others mentioned above, only exacerbate the situation, because they publish the dramatic money numbers, even when they are completely unrealistic or an outright fabrication. Or like you said, when prisitine condition is the driving force behind a high price, people act like any similar item in any condition is worth that. You see that kinda wishful thinking on craigslist a lot, I guess some of them show up here asking for price advice sometimes. Everyone looking for that Roadshow find!
I think the only reason I got this so cheaply is because its a con. There is relatively little info on con boards if you google them. Also, this board was in the outside area where the auction house puts things that they believe are not high value items.
great find - I’m sure your dad has paid his dues for those gems he’s found, cool that he looks for surfing stuff for you
a bit off topic, but did you ever follow the story about the guy who bought a bunch of old surfing negatives at the Rose Bowl swap meet - turns out they were unclaimed archives from Surfing Magazine, and he ended up being able to gift a lot of photos to the surfers and photographers who never got a copy - a whole generation of surf & photo stars like flame, dan merkel, larry bertelman, rory russel, etc etc. Ended up making a movie about it, which I have somewhere, but can’t recall the title of! Anyway, amazing story.
Question: How bad would it hurt the collector value of this board to put a modern fin box in it? I’ve taken measurements and I can easily put a modern 10.5" box in it without it looking out of place. A 10.5" box will fit the existing opening almost perfectly and the router would only be cleaning the edges and squaring the corners of the existing opening. I could pull a template off of the original fin and make a copy to fit the modern box.
There are guys here with way more surfboard- specific knowledge. But if surfboards follow the pattern of most collectibles, you would pretty much destroy the collectible value at that point and all you would have is an old surfboard with a new fin box - but hopefully one that would be fun to ride. I’m interested to hear what others say on the subject.
So this morning I got down to the task of carefully extracting the fin. First step was to carefully drill off the head of the original set screw. I only hit it with the drill for a few seconds at a time then put a wet rag on it to keep things cool. I did not want to melt any plastic. Once I got the head off a quick tap with a rubber mallet and the fin was out. Next I used a soldering iron to heat up the set screw and wiggled out what was left. They molded in a knurled reciever for the set screw. I then cleaned up the box.
At this stage I have not made up my mind what my plan is. I am leaning towards putting a modern box in as the original opening is nearly identical to the rout for a modern box. I have options as I’ve saved the reciever from the old box and can extract the remnants of the old screw and put it back in the box if I want.
If you look closely at the pictures of the box you can see the gap from the box being loose particularly at the front. Its as if the plastic from the original box shrank with age.
Next step is to painstakingly repair every ding and crack on the board. Regardless of what I decide on the fin box I plan on sanding off the half assed gloss coat someone tried to put on this board. Last thing I will do is put a brand new gloss down and polish. Just need to decide if this should be a preservation or a practical upgrade so I can ride it.
To give an idea of how big this fin is I laid it down on top of a modern shortboard.
I ran into a similiar problem with one of these fin systems. The receiver ended up pulling out of the plastic, just as yours did. So I reset the receiver with 5 minute epoxy and it seems to be holding fine. If you keep the original box, you can still buy one of those fins from Fins Unlimited. At least as of 2-3 years ago, they offered that fin in smoke and clear. Then you can surf it with the newer fin and save the original fin which could be quite brittle now. Another option would be to “pot” a modern fiberglass fin into the original box. In would probably ride better than with the polycarbonate fin. As far as what happens to the collector value of the board if you put in a modern Fins Unlimited box, it goes way down. Many collectors will not even consider buying a board with a replacement fin box. That may not be what the ride-em-don’t-hide-em crowd wants to hear, but that’s the reality of the collector world.
I’ve been pretty lazy lately. This afternoon I got to working on fixing the loose fin box. I created a dam around the box and taped around the base of the fin. Leveled the board out on the racks. Next I thinned some resin and catalized it to go off slow. Poured in the resin and alternated between rocking the fin box back and forth and using a palm sander to create high frequency vibration in the board. My goal here was to get the thinned resin to work its way as deep as possible around the box. The vibrations from the palm sander worked wonders as you could instantly see tiny air bubbles coming up from below. Waiting now to pull tape.
~~The palm sander worked great. I stood it on end with the vacume port against the board. It was like ultra-sonic vibration. If I set a razor blade on the board it would hover like an air-hockey puck and slide off.
