Just got a board from a friend who was cleaning out his garage. He got it at least 10 years ago and doesn’t remember much about it. It says it was designed and shaped by Greg Szabad, who as far as I can tell, shapes bodyboards, not surfboards. It also has a logo from Sentinel Foam, which I’ve never heard of before. There’s also a BZ logo on the board. No real signature or serial number, and only the length measurement. It’s a pretty generic shortboard with glass on fins.
I’m planning on stripping off the glass and reshaping it because there are a ton of dings and pressure dents along the rails that don’t seem worth it to try to fill. I’m just looking for a little history lesson if any of you happen to know anything about the foam or the shaper.
Well, once opon a time there was a guy called Tom Morey, who took some foam that was mostly used for packaging and made a bellyboard kind of thing out of the stuff. After a while the outfit that made the foam, Packaging Industries Group, decided that maybe they oughtta get into it and their brand was BZ, the division doing it was Sentinel Products.
Reason I know about it is they were headquartered out of Hyannis Mass at the time and we sold a helluva lot of really bad Chinese or Taiwanese made bodyboards they had during the heyday of bodyboards, different product line entirely.
The surfboards and such I had seen from them were soft, Morey Doyle types with, usually, a fiberglass I-beam stringer or several inside 'em and bodyboard-type fins held on with what were, basicly, great big plastic screws. I hadn’t heard of a glassed version.