The vee bottom boards masterfully ridden by Australian Bob McTavish in the mid '60s were groundbreaking designs that foresahadowed the shortboard revolution that would soon follow. To see the progression of the design, fast forward just a couple of years to Billy Hamilton, Mark Martinson, and Keith Paull at Hossegor and Biarritz in the late '60s flick "Waves of Change", and more recently to Ryan Burch on a "V bowls" design in the wonderful short "The Shakes".
Continuing this progression of the vee bottom design - but with some radical new elements and construction concepts - is high on my list with the launch of Qustom Product.
I got started down this path after spending many a day at Bird's Surf Shed last spring working on Bird's Cushman scooter. Of course every time I enter Bird's shrine to everlasting surf stoke I have to browse the insane collection of vintage boards on display, and there were two that I kept pulling out of the racks and staring at incessantly from every possible angle - a Challenger Micro Vee and a Surfboards Hawaii Model V.
One day Bird asked me if I wanted to borrow them, and that turned into a two month long love affair with these crazy boards and a lengthy writeup on iSurfedThere.com.
I had so much fun on those old boards that I decided that one of my first forays into surfboard building and design with Qustom Product will be to recreate these amazingly fast and difficult to ride boards with some modern design elements, with the goal of keeping all of the speed elements in place, but mixing in some of my own special tweaks to increase handling and stabliity.
Check out the full article here, and stay tuned for more!
