![]() #Dixon family surf boards movie#It went great! We’d have a surfing demo during the day, then show the movie at night. Phil Edwards and his wife, Mike Hynson, Joey Cabell, a whole squad. You rent the theaters and I’ll pay the advertising.’ So I got a Ford Condor bus, and I got Corky Carroll, “So I got together with Bruce,Īnd said, ‘Hey, an East Coast Hobie promotion combined with your movie might be a pretty good thing. “… by the time Bruce did Endless Summer, it was just peaking,” recalled Alter. Make no mistake, Dave Sweet Surfboards was quite profitable.” 159 Kits on both the retail and wholesale levels and blanks to other surfboard builders where labor was less of a factor. Others in the industry required a dealer network and wholesale level pricing. Amplified by a well advertised mail order business, all our sales were at retail, allowing us to hold a good margin. Our customer base was in the greater Santa Monica area, which was strong on its ownĪccord. ![]() Not to be overlooked was our direct marketing strategy. Later subcontracting our glass work, we made good money at our production levels. By blowing our own foam, preparing the blanks, rough shaping myself and “I figure that Dewey and the other big manufacturers had to build three or four boards to my one to generate the same profit. Sweet’s advantage wasn’t in the numbers, it was in the streamlined This was compared to operations like Dewey Weber’s or Hobie Alter’s, whose runs were easily in the 3,000 boards a year range. But they were no good, and we didn’t pursue foam anymore.ĭuring the early 1960s, Dave Sweet Surfboards remained a relatively small but successful operation, expanding into three adjoining industrial spaces with an annual production run that rarely exceeded 800 Joey Cabell actually loved the things, he rode one of themįor a while. You had to finish them with glue or epoxy. I think Rennie’s turned out better, but they were both terrible… they rattled like peas in a pod. Rennie Yater (who worked for me at the time) and I had each Just huge, open celled foam, like the kind you find in arts and crafts stores. ![]() At this time, when you said foam you meant what we call Styrofoam, which was horrible, you could take your finger and just push it right through. It was kind of crude, but it was hard and dense… you could just get your fingernail in it. “One Friday night in February of ‘58,” Hobie tells the story, “this guy, Kent Doolittle, walked into the shop and showed us this little piece of foam that was about this big aroundĪnd about that thick (Hobie’s hands abstract a shape roughly the size of a deck of cards). “Well, you might call it that,” agreed Yater, “because He did, like I say, very extreme things.” In essence, this was the beginning of rocker in surfboards. Theyĭidn’t get essentially that way right away. It just made surfboards, instead of being straight, with a little curve to them quite a bit more curve to them. Rennie Yater pointed out that, “His spoon nose, you know ‑ it’s been copied ever since. It’s probable that Simmons developed the balsa Spoon for larger breaks like Ventura Overhead and La Jolla’s Bird Rock due to its relatively pointed nose. #Dixon family surf boards full#Sessions came the Simmons “Spoon.” It was a 10-foot solid male balsa board with a full belly, kicked up nose, thin rails and a glassed and foiled wooden fin. All three scooped their noses, dropped the rails and shaped the tailblocks in various experimental ways. As an example, Quigg fashioned the first fiberglass fin during this period. Simmons, Quigg and Kivlin carried their board-building New Simmons ‘spoon.’“ 42 Nat referred to one of the many other ideas to pop out at this time. “If you really wanted one of his boards,” wrote Nat Young, who talked with some guys around at the time, “you had to pay for it up front and sometimes you had to wait for a year to get a This is the method developed by Hobie Alter and Gordon “Grubby” Clark in the late 1950s. Most of these blanks are made oversize so the custom builder can trim them down to shapes desired by individual buyers.” 6 The molded blanks are now ready to be sold to custom The heat cures the foam, which is then removed from the molds. Once the mix is in the molds it is baked for approximately thirty minutes. TheĬhemical liquids are first heated, mixed in new clean paper containers that can only be used once, and then poured into the molds (One foam blank manufacturer used so many paper containers that he had to build his own containerįactory to keep up with his needs). The blank is the semi-fiinished shape that emerges from the mold when the chemicals are mixed and then ‘cooked‘… Several chemical ingredients go into the mix before a board blank is cast. Surfboards do not come out of the molds as a finished product. “Perhaps the most important advantage in manufacturing,” wrote Peter Dixon in the 1969 edition of The Complete Book of Surfing, “is that foam can be mixed and molded into almost any size and shape. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |