The evolution of surfboard weights and consequently strength is sometimes over looked in the discussion of a surfboards life span.

When I started surfing the foam and fiberglass surfboard was the standard. There were a few wood boards around but really weren’t sold much if at all commercially. My second board was balsa but I made it from an old board that I stripped down, reshaped and re-glassed.

For the most part boards in the early sixties were about 30 to 35 pounds, and generally were between 9’6 and 10’ in length, 23 to 24 inches wide and in the 3 inches thick range. The foam was a bit more dense. As an example, the common weight of surf blanks now is between 20% and 40% lighter than foams of the early sixties. That means if you have a 9 foot blank now that weights around 10 pounds the comparable blanks from the early days would be 2 to 4 pounds more. A short board blank, unshaped, that weights around 5 pound would have been around 6 or 7 pounds… of course there were no short board blanks then.

Now that dosen’t seem like much but, in the sixties a typical stringer was ¾ inch redwood or maybe 2 inch balsa. Now? A longboard will have a ¼ inch to 3/8 inch stringer and short boards 1/8. The difference in wood weight could be as much as 2 or 3 pounds.

The glassing schedule of the old boards was considerably heavier, and there was a reason… surfboards weren’t attached to your leg back then. If you fell and lost your board it was vulnerable and could get a whacking from other surfers and their boards and or what ever was on the beach… like rocks… the boards final resting place if you couldn’t catch up to it before it got to shore.

The typical glass job before we started making boards lighter was 20 oz glass top and bottom. That’s 2 layers of 10 ounce cloth for the deck and bottom of your board. One layer from each side would lap so you had 30 ounces on the rails. That is a significant difference in what boards are glassed with now.

Is it needless to say that boards held up better before the foams became lighter and the glassing schedules were reduced to less than half of what they once were? So… how did this happen?

For me, I didn’t need a heavy glass job because I got better at surfing and didn’t loose my board so I could glass it lighter…. Maybe 2 layers of 8 ounce. Then I liked the lightness and went to one layer of 8 on the bottom and 2 layers on the deck. When boards got shorter we wanted them lighter as well so a layer of 8 on the bottom and a layer of 8 on the deck with a 2/3 8 patch was good. It kept going, next it was 6 once cloth instead of 8. 8 ounce cloth is actually 7 ½ once by the way.

Stringers kept getting thinned down too, from ¾ inch to ½ to ¼ . Some boards in the late sixties and into 1970 had 1/16 stringers.

When guys started attaching their boards to their legs and didn’t have to worry about a lost and probably dinged up board in the process we started glassing boards with 4 ounce cloth. And all along the blanks were lighter too.

It was surfers that wanted lighter boards. As boards got lighter and lighter I don’t remember anyone complaining that they also got damaged easier or even broke. Now… it’s not uncommon for surfers to complain that boards don’t last long and get bust up easy. Yet it’s been surfers all along that have wanted their boards made the very way they are now… light and destructible.

D.R.