Haarvard,
1. In 1960 I put concaves on both ends of a board
2. Prior to 1963 foam surfboards had little rocker, emulating the balsa boards that preceded them. That year I shaped a board with much more rocker than anything seen before - so much that it looked like a big banana to people who saw it in the water. We ended up calling it the Banana Model and the Rich Chew, who rode it, went on to win the first USSA championship with it. Am I the father of rocker? I don’t know if anyone else was doing it, but I certainly did not copy anyone.
3. I am widely given credit for developing flexible nose rocker for a better nose ride in the early sixties.
4. In the seventies, before he moved on to become the photo editor for Surfing Magazine, Larry (Flame) Moore was the one who glued our (mostly short board) blanks in house. We didn’t trust Clark to get the rockers correct. They finally got it together so in the early eighties we had to abandon that operation. Soon we were taking more long board orders and I started questioning Clark Foam about rocker not being exactly what I ordered. I built a series of male deck rocker templates so I could check glue ups as they were delivered. I discovered that the blanks would loose rocker from narrow stringers or from too much bending. They now refer to these changes as Spring Back. I don’t know if I was the first to realize this, but I had never heard it mentioned before those templates.
5. By the mid 70’s I was experimenting with vinyl ester resin and linear polyurethane finishes.
6. About 1975 I created a set of shaping racks that were fixed to the floor and one had a rectangular telescoping tube that made the rack adjustable for both long and short boards.
7. During the late 70’s and early 80’s we (actually I did most of the laminating) glassed all of our boards with “S” glass. I later determined that, because of the memory characteristic it was more prone to deck delaminations.
8. In 1984 I developed a profiling jig that was operated by hand. These were not new to this industry, but I had never seen one that was capable of putting in “V”.
9. In the early eighties I began to add lots more tail rocker to my surfboards. I started to measure where the bend was on the boards that worked well and still use this theory today. Interestingly these numbers apply to both long and short boards.
10. In the early nineties I invented a tool that crowns the deck evenly. This tool, or one that use the same principle, is just now finding itself into a few shaping rooms.
11. In the mid nineties I saw a need for a true high performance single fin long board. After several months of experimenting with outline and rocker combinations, I realized that the fin was the one thing that was holding the design back. I began working with my fin maker, sending him new templates two to three times a month. After twenty-two refinements and more than six months of testing, we had developed a series of three HP fins, 9.0, 9.5, and 10.0. Interestingly they are not exactly alike, as you cannot photographically blow up the smaller and expect to get the larger to work. The tip wags like the tail of a fish giving amazing thrust upon exiting a turn. This fin design is sold worldwide and the fin maker acknowledges that few have ever put this much energy into developing a fin. Most single fin long boarders riding a shape with hard tail rails, find this fin improves their board, no matter who shaped it. We now have a center fin with the same concept that we have adapted for the 2+1 setups. Last year Tim Stamps, Harbour Surfboards’ shaper, created a side bite shape that has vertical foil, to allow some tip flex.
I did not invent it, but I feel that, in the past 46 years I have contributed my share of innovation into the development of today’s modern surfboard.
