posts: 158897
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| post_id | thread_id | thread_title | post_number | author_username | post_date | post_date_iso | post_body |
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| 158897 | 6778 | Shaper thread (show us what you are shaping) | 62 | Bruce Fowler | Oct 17, 2019 | 2019-10-17T17:17:27-0400 | My first surfboard had been a 10'2" Greg Noll that flew off my brother's best friend's car in Santa Ana winds near Haskell's Beach north of Goleta. He lived on the property in one of three houses provided by the oil company because his dad worked for them. He gave it to my brother to bring home for me. It had 2 feet of the nose broken off, 50 to 60 dings, and the skeg had been ripped off. This was in 1959, and trying to find resin & fiberglass was difficult in Santa Barbara. My mother took my brother Gary & I to a fabric shop down near the traffic lights on U.S. 101. A big skinny tall man was at the counter and my mother asked him if they carried fiberglass. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said "give me a minute to see if I can find something in back". Reappearing from behind the curtain, he held a piece of some light tan fabric. He then said "I think this might be fiberglass....... I'm pretty sure this will work, just give me a dollar for it." The next challenge was to find resin. He told us to go up the street to "Pep Boys" because guys that work on their Corvettes, which the bodys are made out of fiberglass, get resin there. Mom told the guy what our project was, and the Pep Boys clerk sold her a can of "Rocket Resin" with the hardener then said, "ya know, if the surfboard has that many holes, you'd be smart to buy some Bondo for filling them, Bondo is pretty easy to work with". We packed up and drove back to the ranch, ten miles up San Marcos Pass in the mountains above Santa Barbara where we lived with Annabelle my burro, our horses, ducks, chickens, cats. dogs and cattle. We got to work on the carcass of what had once been a beautiful sled by Greg Noll. Dad gave me a surform, a saw, a plane and some sandpaper. Little did I know this was the beginning of my shaping career. I was eight. My brother was in 8th grade, and he ended up making a wood laminated skeg in his wood shop class. It looked pretty damn good, I thought. But all the Bondo fills looked like shit. The tan cloth had gone on my reshaped nose okay, but I had to cut out bubbles and fill those areas with more Bondo. We sunk the fin into a resin fill cavity and taped it into place. The resin got too hot and cracked some, so we did a secondary fill with some more resin. The fin was a little tilted to one side, but it was too late to do anything about it. The board ended up 8'3". All the patches looked hideous, so we ended up buying some "Candy Apple Green" enamel. We painted the whole thing except for the fin, because that was the best thing about the whole board. My brother confessed, that he had gotten a lot of help from his wood shop teacher. So there it was. My first ride! I paddled her out on a small day at Leadbetter across from Santa Barbara City College. There was a girl out there ripping, which was a really rare deal in those days. Later on I found out her name was Linda Merrill and she went on to become the first women on the cover of "Surfer Magazine" and Mike Doyle's tandem partner. That summer I started walking out to the end of the SB Breakwater to surf "Sand Bar". That was where I accidentally took off at a slight angle to the wave and leaned in toward the wave going right. The next thing I knew, I was angling for the first time in my life. That one accidental right slide made me feel like I was going a million miles an hour, and I've been hooked ever since! I saved my allowance and skateboarded along the road by our ranch with a back pack collecting pop bottles so I could eventually have enough money to order a custom surfboard. When I thought I had enough money (my parents said they'd cover the rest), I sold my first board to a friend for $9. The 2nd time he surfed it, it broke into three pieces. |